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Designing Choice
This project investigates how spatial design can be mobilised to expand human agency within coercive mobility systems, using the Lekki–Ikoyi Toll Gate in Lagos, Nigeria, as a spatial and infrastructural case study. Rather than treating the bridge as a discrete object to be redesigned, the project positions the toll gate as a spatial condition—one produced by interdependent systems of governance, infrastructure, access, and control that shape how mobility is experienced and constrained.
The Lekki–Ikoyi Bridge and toll gate constitute the primary link between two major economic zones in Lagos. For many residents, the toll functions not simply as a mechanism for infrastructure funding, but as an instrument of economic compulsion—extracting daily payments from individuals with limited mobility alternatives. This coercive condition was made violently visible during the 2020 #EndSARS protests, when demonstrators gathered at the toll gate to resist police brutality and economic injustice. The state’s military response, resulting in loss of life, transformed the site into a locus of trauma, memory, and civic rupture.
This project contends that the injustices associated with the Lekki–Ikoyi toll system are not inherent to the physical bridge itself, but are spatially produced through the broader conditions that surround it: restricted route availability, mobility dependency, policing practices, economic stratification, and the systematic erasure of community histories. To frame the bridge alone as the “problem” risks obscuring the spatial and infrastructural dynamics that limit agency and naturalise extraction.
How do you create choice where there is no choice?
This question guides the project as a spatial design inquiry, one that does not intervene by altering the bridge’s form, but by reshaping the spatial conditions that structure movement, access, and civic presence around it. Spatial design operates here as a means of materialising agency—through public interfaces, mobility nodes, civic thresholds, and memory infrastructures that influence how people move, gather, and are seen.
Rather than aestheticising trauma or proposing symbolic repair alone, the project treats space as an active political medium. It explores how spatial interventions can support alternative pathways, enable collective presence, and embed public memory into everyday environments. In doing so, spatial design becomes a tool for constructing new social relations, expanding civic visibility, and asserting the right to move, gather, and be heard.
The objective is not to rehabilitate “broken people,” but to confront and transform damaging spatial systems. Designing Choice envisions futures in which mobility is no longer a practice of extraction, but a condition through which freedom, agency, and collective life can emerge.