Barbara Summers: Remaking the City from the Margins

Abstract

In Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil capital, nearly half a million people live in dense informal waterfront settlements that fringe the city's creeks. The waterfronts are built on infilled mangroves and disconnected from the upland city. These communities face systemic neglect, severe environmental degradation from oil extraction, and a total absence of public services.

In 2009, the Greater Port Harcourt Master Plan designated all waterfront settlements as "open space," resulting in mass demolitions and forced evictions, including over 20,000 people displaced in a single weekend without warning or compensation. These violent actions — rationalized as urban development — sparked a grassroots counter-response through the Chicoco Collective: to resist invisibility with visibility and move from opposition to proposition.

CMAP/Chicoco Collective is a community-driven initiative that blends human rights advocacy, media production, urban planning, and participatory design to challenge spatial injustice. Chicoco's response centers on combining spatial data with stories, music, and media to reframe the city through the eyes of its most marginalized residents. This multidimensional approach includes a community radio station that trains youth to document and broadcast life in waterfront communities, a cinema program featuring screenings and films created by residents, a music collective focused on music in movement-making, and a participatory mapping and planning team. These maps serve as legal evidence and primary negotiating tools for communities to use in sustainable planning. Chicoco's work reimagines city-making in one of Nigeria's most contested urban landscapes, showing that even those excluded from official plans can still design, plan, and narrate their futures.

Biography

Barbara Summers (M.R.P. '14) is the Director of Spatial Research and Strategies for the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP). In this role, she manages and leads a participatory mapping and planning program for marginalized waterfront slum dwellers in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her career spans over ten years working on urban planning, climate justice, and climate change adaptation across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa for organizations such as the World Bank, GCOM, I2UD, IISD, GGGI, The Nature Conservancy, Oxfam, among others. She has been the lead and contributing author on several regional, national, and city reports that assess and provide policy recommendations on sustainable urban development and local governance in the Global South. Barbara received her M.R.P. from Cornell's City and Regional Planning (CRP) program in 2014.