Lagos
From 1.4M to 21M in 50 years with 66% in slums—Lagos generates $260B GDP and Africa's fastest tech ecosystem through r-selection growth that outpaces every infrastructure system built to contain it.
Lagos grew from 1.4 million people in 1970 to over 21 million today and will likely double again by 2050—becoming the third-largest city on earth with less infrastructure than any other megacity of comparable size. This is r-selection at urban scale: explosive reproduction with minimal parental investment in each offspring, producing a city where 66% of residents live in informal settlements and two-thirds of economic activity operates outside formal systems. Lagos reproduces economically the way a fruit fly reproduces biologically—short generations, massive output, most individuals surviving on minimal resources.
The city began as fishing villages controlled by the Benin and Oyo Empires until British colonization in 1861. Lagos became Nigeria's capital at independence in 1960, then lost that status when the federal government relocated to Abuja in 1991. The capital moved but the economy stayed. Lagos generates $260 billion in GDP—27% of Nigeria's total output and over 50% of non-oil GDP, exceeding the GNP of any individual West African country. Like an organism that loses its head but keeps growing because the body has its own metabolic logic, Lagos functions as a headless economic capital.
Nigeria's informal economy represents roughly 57% of GDP, and Lagos concentrates more of it than anywhere else. Millions work as street vendors, recyclers, unregistered manufacturers, and cash-based traders without tax registration or labor protections. Fintech is digitizing this economy without formalizing it—Paystack (acquired by Stripe for $200 million), Flutterwave, and OPay (backed by SoftBank's $400 million) process transactions for micro-enterprises invisible to government statistics. Lagos emerged as the world's fastest-growing tech city in 2025 on Dealroom's Global Tech Ecosystem Index—at just $1,600 GDP per capita, outperforming far wealthier cities in enterprise value growth.
Nollywood, producing thousands of films annually, illustrates the same pattern: massive creative output with minimal capital per unit, generating cultural influence that exceeds its budget the way a coral reef generates biodiversity that exceeds its biomass. Afrobeats achieved global reach through identical low-cost, high-volume logic.
Lagos faces a biological paradox: the r-selection strategy that powered its growth cannot build the infrastructure its population requires. Sewage, roads, electricity, and water demand k-selection investment—expensive, slow, maintained. The city spreads like water hyacinth across a lagoon: spectacularly fast on the surface, with root systems that cannot support the canopy's weight.