Inspired by the colorful chaos and creative resilience of Nigeria’s bustling street markets, designer Paul Yakubu has unveiled the “Umbrella Crate Stall”—a game-changing design innovation that merges informality with intentionality, and improvisation with architectural sophistication.

In the swarming, sun-soaked streets of Lagos and cities across Nigeria, the humble umbrella does far more than shield vendors from the elements. It carves out space in the chaos, becomes a landmark for loyal customers, and serves as a stage for daily commerce. These iconic umbrella stalls, often assembled from discarded materials and instinctive design, are the lifeblood of Africa’s informal economy—and they’ve now inspired a bold new vision for what informal trade could look like in the future.

Enter the Umbrella Crate Stall, a modular, mobile, and mesmerizing structure conceived by Paul Yakubu, a visionary designer who spent years studying the DNA of informal umbrella markets. His mission? To celebrate the ingenuity of these often-overlooked systems while reimagining them for contemporary urban environments.

“I wanted to ask, how do you design for informality?” Yakubu explains. “The answer wasn’t to impose new rules—it was to look deeper into the structures that already work.”

Design Rooted in the Real World

The Umbrella Crate Stall is not just a homage—it’s a deep dive into the logic, culture, and urban value of informal umbrella setups. Yakubu’s research revealed the umbrella’s role as a territorial marker, its ability to accommodate varied merchandise and trade types, and its signature transitory nature that mirrors the fluid rhythms of urban life. He noticed how traders creatively repurposed waste materials—discarded plastic, crates, metal rods—to build these pop-up economies from the ground up.

With these insights, Yakubu developed a new architectural language—one that honors the resourcefulness and resilience of the informal sector, while offering structure, beauty, and adaptability.

The Anatomy of the Stall

The centerpiece of the design is the umbrella itself—this time, reimagined as a circular framework from which everything else flows. Around it spins a system of angular display crates, pivoting like satellites to showcase goods in multiple directions. These crates are not just functional—they’re interactive, inviting customers to touch, feel, and explore.

The structure’s rotational flexibility allows vendors to tailor their setups on the fly, adapting to different market layouts, product types, and even the position of the sun. The entire unit rests on wheels, making it effortlessly transportable—a nod to the nomadic reality of many small traders.

What makes the Umbrella Crate Stall especially radical is its modular scalability. Starting from a compact 4-crate module, traders can expand their setup in arcs, all the way to a 20-crate full structure. This growth-friendly design reflects the economic aspirations of small-scale traders, many of whom begin with little and build up their businesses over time.

From Lagos to Marseille

The first full-scale prototype was unveiled during a VersantSud residency in Marseille, France, where Yakubu explored global south urbanism through a European lens. Constructed from waste crate baskets and recycled steel, the stall captured the essence of adaptive reuse and circular design—principles long practiced in informal settlements, now finally gaining architectural recognition.

This prototype marked the launch of umbrellArch, Yakubu’s new design-research lab devoted to exploring the architectural and cultural logic of informal umbrella structures. The lab develops interactive, adaptive systems that bridge the gap between grassroots ingenuity and formal design thinking.

A New Vision for Informal Urbanism

Occupying just 12 square meters—the same footprint as a traditional umbrella stall—Yakubu’s creation provides structure without rigidity, function without formality, and beauty without excess. It solves real-world challenges faced by traders, from display limitations to transportation hurdles, while preserving the vibrant character of the informal markets it stems from.

This is not just a product; it’s a provocation—a call to architects, urban planners, and policymakers to stop designing around informality and start designing with it.

In a world hurtling toward smart cities and digital marketplaces, Paul Yakubu’s Umbrella Crate Stall is a poignant reminder: the future of urban design might just be hiding in plain sight, beneath the shade of an umbrella in a street market.