Live, Work, Play at Imperial Business City
Home owners in the emerging Imperial International Business City (IIBC) will have the luxury of living within their work and leisure environment, on account of its concept.
The evolving city is a joint venture project between the Elegushi Royal Family (ERF) and Channeldrill Resources Limited, and it is planned on about 200 hectares of land at the edge of the Lagos Lagoon.
Its promoters said it was conceived as “the first selfsustaining eco-friendly smart business city to be built in Africa. The city is for both the present and future of Lagos, offering space for home, work and leisure.”According to them, the city is also well-designed to be flood-free and to respond to the challenges and opportunities in Lagos, particularly for discerning investors.
The Chief Executive Officer of Channeldrill Resources, Mr. Femi Akioye said, “Imperial City is coming to address the housing constraints in Lagos. What we are developing is an island that will attract the best companies from Nigeria and across the globe. It is a place where work, home and play are walking distances from one another and it is set in a tropical landscape that is safe, relaxing and a pleasure to live in. It is an island that will be utility self-sufficient, ensuring that its luxury homes will always have water, power and sanitation.”
Akioye said the consultant for the city’s development is Mott MacDonald Limited of London, a firm that is renowned for such construction of such infrastructural work.
“The infrastructure design of the city would ensure that it is self-sustaining, must be smart, eco-friendly and must have steady traffic flow”, assured Stuart Croucher, head of the Mott MacDonald team, which was on four-day visit and inspection of Ikate Elegushi Lagos, the city’s project site.
Croucher said the city would have general utility efficiency and would be leveraging the best technology to archive these design, adding that the developers had charged them to make sure the city was a zero-flood zone for the next 100 years. He said, “To be able to achieve this task, we are working with Royal Haskoning DHV Nederland B.V., who are the reclamation/ marine and marina consultants. They have done an extensive research on the lagoon and the future rise in water level of the whole lagoon and the report is what they are now working with to make sure that the zeroflood zones is archived. Because of the future rise in the water level, IIBC will be reclaimed at 3.5m above sea level.” According to Croucher, even though Mott MacDonald has been involved in infrastructure design of most of the major smart and eco-friendly cities in the world, they are excited to be involved in such a major project in Lagos.
He said the city was being designed to have the best road network for efficient transportation system and that was why they were taking the future developmental expansion and population growth of Lagos for the next 50 years into consideration.
“As much as we have projected the population data for the future city, it is important to get the same for the whole of Lekki area so as to develop a proper outside connectivity/ access plan for the residents of the city,” he said, adding that they had the Lagos 2030 transport vision, which would be useful for their connectivity design.