Architecture And Politics In Africa

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Innovative study of state politics, identity and buildings that sheds new light on the links between the material and the ideational realms of contemporary life in Africa.

Housing matters, no matter when or where. This volume of collected essays on housing in colonial and postcolonial Africa seeks to elaborate the how and the why. Housing is much more than a living everyday practice. It unfolds in its disparate dimensions of time, space and agency. Context dependent, it acquires diverse, often ambivalent, meanings. Housing can be a promise, an unfulfilled dream, a tool of self- and class-assertion, a negotiation process, or a means to achieve other ends. Our focus lies in analyzing housing in its multifacetedness, be it a lens to offer insights into complex processes that shape societies; be it a tool of empire to exercise control over private relations of inhabitants; or be it a means to create good, obedient and productive citizens. Contributions to this volume range from the field of history, to architecture and urban planning, African Studies, linguistics, and literature. The individual case studies home in on specific aspects and dimensions of housing and seek to bring them into dialogue with each other. By doing so, the volume aims to add to the vibrant academic debate on studying urban practices and their significance for current social change.

Colonial architecture and urbanism carved its way through space: ordering and classifying the built environment, while projecting the authority of European powers across Africa in the name of science and progress. The built urban fabric left by colonial powers attests to its lingering impacts in shaping the present and the future trajectory of postcolonial cities in Africa. Colonial Architecture and Urbanism explores the intersection between architecture and urbanism as discursive cultural projects in Africa. Like other colonial institutions such as the courts, police, prisons, and schools, that were crucial in establishing and maintaining political domination, colonial architecture and urbanism played s pivotal role in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, it is the cultural destination of colonial architecture and urbanism and the connection between them and colonialism that the volume seeks to critically address. The contributions drawn from different interdisciplinary fields map the historical processes of colonial architecture and urbanism and bring into sharp focus the dynamic conditions in which colonial states, officials, architects, planners, medical doctors and missionaries mutually constructed a hierarchical and exclusionary built environment that served the wider colonial project in Africa.

This volume offers an informed and critical analysis of the operationalization and institutionalization of the peace and security architecture by the African Union and Africa's Regional Economic Communities (RECs). It examines the institutions that will carry the mandate forward, raises pertinent research questions for the successful operationalization of the architecture and debates the medium and long-term challenges to implementation.

UNESCO aims to tackle Africa’s under-representation on its World Heritage List by inscribing instances of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern architecture and urban planning there. But, what is one to make of the utopias of progress and development for which these buildings and sites stand? After all, concern for ‘modern heritage’ invariably—and paradoxically it seems—has to reckon with those utopias as problematic futures of the past, a circumstance complicating intentions to preserve a recent ‘culture’ of modernization on the African continent. This book, a new title in Routledge’s Studies in Culture and Development series, introduces the concept of ‘global heritage assemblages’ to analyse that problem. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, it describes how various governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea, Tanzania, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo. Rausch argues that the global heritage assemblages emerging from those examples produce problematizations of the modern’, which ultimately indicate a contemporary need to rescue modernity from its dominant conception as an all-encompassing, epochal, and spatial culture.

Building Change investigates the shifting relationships between power, space and architecture in a world where a number of subjected people are reasserting their political and cultural agency. To explore these changes, the book describes and analyzes four recent building projects embedded in complex and diverse historical, political, cultural and spatial circumstances. The projects yield a range of insights for revitalizing the role of architecture as an engaged cultural and spatial practice.

A new edition of the most comprehensive survey of modern architecture in Africa to date. When the first edition of African Modernism was published in 2015, it was received with international praise and has been sought after constantly ever since it went out of print in 2018. Marking Park Books' 10th anniversary, this landmark book becomes available again in a new edition. In the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial power. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed countries expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features one hundred buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, and selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were newly taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster for the book's first edition. Their photographs document the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed in an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Further essays on postcolonial Africa and specific aspects and topics, also illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume.