Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, sits in a state so filled with lagoons that more than a fifth of it is covered in water. The prime land in the city is on Victoria Island, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. In the early aughts, Bola Tinubu, the former governor of Lagos State, said that he had grown worried about the sea eroding the island’s coastline; the area is, on average, two metres above sea level, and businesses along the coastal highway have been flooded in the past. He enlisted the Lebanese-Nigerian property developer Gilbert Chagoury, of Nigeria’s Chagoury Group, to reach into the ocean and put up a sea wall along the island’s original coastline. The newly reclaimed space between the former shore and the new wall—a total of ten square kilometres—will be filled with shiny towers of luxury apartments and retail outlets, skyscrapers with Lagos’s most profitable businesses, parks, and a man-made marina. All told, it will be a multi-billion-dollar project. (Chagoury is one of Nigeria’s richest men and once advised the country’s late dictator Sani Abacha.) Soon, two hundred and fifty thousand wealthy Nigerians and foreigners will be living in Lagos’s own version of the futuristic cartoon “The Jetsons.”

The state government in Lagos recently released a short, slick video touting Lagos as “Africa’s Big Apple” which features shots of the glitzy artificial city, known as Eko Atlantic. The video also shows a parade of fast boats, traffic-free roads, glamorous hotel pools, and clothing boutiques. Heads of government agencies talk about the gains that Lagos—believed to be the world’s fastest growing city, and which has an estimated population of twenty million people—has made in mass transit and tax collection. The city’s visionary, controversial mayor, Babatunde Fashola, appears briefly, urging residents of Lagos to play their parts in achieving the mega-city dream. The video was perhaps not meant to be watched by actual, opinionated Lagosians. While residents of Lagos would find it difficult to argue that their city is undergoing a makeover that began over the last decade, the problems that still exist—overcrowded, underserved slums; poor sanitation; and troubled schools—make the video feel awkward. Eko Atlantic underscores the worry among some Lagosians that their government wants to protect only the city’s rich from rising sea levels.

“Eko Atlantic will be centered on Eko Boulevard, which is more or less a reproduction of Fifth Avenue in New York,” David Frame, the head of Chagoury Group’s construction division South Energyx Nigeria, told me. Eko Boulevard will have a clear view of the sea with four lanes of traffic in each direction, wide sidewalks, and high-rise buildings filled with shops, apartments, cafés, bars, and restaurants. Frame is an Englishman who has lived in Nigeria for thirty-two years, and his snow-haired appearance reminded me of Father Christmas. He listed the planned city’s amenities: clean water flowing from the tap, constant electricity from a private grid, sewage facilities. We were sitting in the sleek Eko Atlantic sales office on Victoria Island as he talked; I suddenly had fantasies of leaving my noisy generator and tepid bottled water behind for the pastures shown in the glossy photos plastered on the walls. Gleaming condo towers, smooth roads, a special genus of palm trees with no falling fruits—even the sky and water looked cleaner, somehow purer, and pollution-free. A photo of the marina, with space for more than two hundred and fifty yachts, shone under a spotlight. I wanted a yacht parking space to go with my clean tap water. On the back wall, a projector replayed a clip of a terrifying computer-generated ocean wave crashing against the sea wall, or as Eko Atlantic calls it, the “Great Wall of Lagos.” But not to fear. The Great Wall effortlessly beat the wave back away from the condos. Frame snapped me out of my reverie. “We’re pioneers—I don’t think we should be shy of saying that,” he said. “And also we’re creating a blueprint of what is possible.”

Maybe. Despite the exciting changes that Fashola’s government is bringing to Lagos (including Eko Atlantic), critics suspect that his vision has little consideration for the urban poor. For example, what about the tens of thousands of people who live in houses on stilts and move around in boats in Makoko, a Lagos slum that rests on the water and that is often under threat of demolition? “The Lagos State government has perpetrated a lot of human-rights abuses in urban slums, forcibly evicting communities without any warning or planning and without any remedy, settlement, or compensation, in their effort to develop the city,” Felix Morka, the director of the Social and Economic Rights Action Center in Lagos, told me. Last week, Morka’s organization released a report with Amnesty International describing multiple land seizures from poor communities. In one case, where nine thousand people were violently evicted from a single slum in February, Fashola told the slum’s residents belatedly, in August, that he was planning to build one thousand and eight new (presumably affordable) apartments for them. And in the case of Eko Atlantic, Morka says that members of a community that lived on the fringes of Bar Beach had their homes set on fire by Lagos police, in 2008, to clear space for construction equipment. Frame says that the people were squatters and that the land was allegedly outside of Eko Atlantic’s boundaries and belonged to the Nigerian Ports Authority.

In the meantime, Nigerians are coming up with innovative ways to help disadvantaged waterside residents. The architect Kunle Adeyimi designed a groundbreaking floating school that serves Makoko, the slum on the water. Adeyimi has said that his vision “can be used to sustainably develop African coastal communities.”

“The government has not done anything for us yet, so people are trying to improve the environment themselves, bettering their sanitation practices,” Afose Sulayman, a Makoko resident, said. Makoko’s residents lack access to clean water and endure endemic poverty. “What people really want is the government to help them develop the community, instead of trying to take the land,” Sulayman added. Lagos, many say, has made progress in upgrading public services, roads, traffic lights, and green spaces, and is embarking on promising sustainable ventures. Its new mini-city may be an example, attracting investment and tourism. But Victoria Island is only a fraction of the mushrooming metropolis. Will the rest of it be left behind?

Top: Illustration courtesy Eko Atlantic. Middle: Photograph by Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters.