Cities make capitalism possible. Although capitalism survives through what British Marxist geographer, David Harvey, calls the ‘spatial fix’ – a strategy of moving to new frontiers as soon as profit is threatened in an existing operational domain, it quickly makes all such newly conquered spaces into cities.
This explains the primacy of the geopolitics of megacities (New York, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Sydney, Cairo, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Shanghai, Beijing, Lagos and so on) in the struggle of nation states for power in the contemporary world. So, the NIIA is fishing in a dense academic forest by choosing “Lagos and Nigeria 2030: Projections of a world power” as the title of its 2025 Distinguished Lecture series.
Whether the topic is something for a politician and one who is currently in power is open to debate but NIIA has made its move. Its audience and all those interested in the interconnections involved are sure to be all ears when the September 16th, 2025 event unfolds.
It could turn out that there might be no better person than Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the incumbent governor of Lagos State, to provoke thoughts on how a basically agrarian African economy can instrumentalise its foremost megacity in the struggle for power under conditions of emergent multipolar regime.
It could turn out such a worthwhile pursuit for all intellectuals and practitioners of spacecraft as well as the diverse layers in the policy mill to listen to the lecture.
