Paper short abstract:

This text will explore the possibilities of urban elites using their power and risk capacity to employ non-conventional social practices to create alternative infrastructures for design production in Lagos, Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

Although much work has been done exploring the effects of lack of infrastructure in Lagos Nigeria, fewer researchers have explored the social practices that work around these issues. Still fewer have explored the way that the socially mobile play a role in attempting in this creation of new infrastructures.Through a focus on design production and a case study of a luxury accessories company in Lagos Nigeria, I will explore the possibility of the socially mobile playing a key role in creating extra-governmental infrastructures.

This text will explore the issue in two parts. First, using Star's The Ethnography of Infrastructure, I will explore the inherently political nature of the lack of design infrastructure in Lagos Nigeria, and how this negatively affects the possibility of creating luxury goods for the urban elite.

Secondly, it will explore how the founder of the luxury brand explored in this text, navigates a complex combination of social elite position (vis-a-vis dual citizenship) and works outside of traditional capitalist models of production including training and teaching practices, while still operating as a for-profit company. Using Lave and Wenger's text "Situated Learning: Peripheral Participation" I will commit to an analysis of the alternative social practices used to subvert existing infrastructures. I conclude the importance of the culture elite using their power to take risk via non conventional structures lies not in some benevolent benefit to the marginalized, but as one of their only limited ways to benefit economically despite the existing dysfunction.