Dry City was a collaborative worldbuilding project for Alex McDowell RDI's World Building as Design Practice course at USC. Inspired in part by the award-winning work of Kunlé Adeyemi and his architecture, design and urbanism company NLÉ, the 2015-2016 world building class of student architects, interactive media designers, musicians, engineers, urban planners, animators, filmmakers and artists chose to focus on the Nigerian city of Lagos and its neighborhood of Makoko in the mid-2030s due to Lagos' rapid urbanization, Nollywood influence, booming economy, and growing population. Most intriguingly, Lagos now is water-poor despite being a port city on the Gulf of Guinea, an irony doubly true for the floating village of Makoko on Lagos Lagoon.

The first semester course focused on Lagos in 2035, and the second semester's course honed in on Makoko in 2036 to more completely evolve the world. Each student created a character in that world and told an hour-by-hour, day-in-the-life story about that character in that world. Dry City: Turning Points was mine, an 8-page photocomic illustrated with collaged-together found online images.

Excerpts from Dry City: Turning Points and other student projects were showcased in the USC IMAX theater at the end of the fall 2015 and spring 2016 semesters, and in Kunlé Adeyemi's Silver Lion-winning Makoko Floating School replica at the 2016 Venice Biennale.