Events

Upcoming

March 27, 2025
Ann Arbor, MI

Time: 9am-5pm
Location: Taubman College Commons

Land, Deed, and Debt: University Campuses in West Africa

Speakers:
Kwasi Adarkwa, Taibat Lawanson, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, Kuukuwa Manful, Łukasz Stanek, Michael Dziwornu

Topics:
Land Imaginaries

The ‘Land, Deed, and Debt’ symposium focuses on the consequences of the “ceding”, “gifting”, and “granting” of land by indigenous communities for the establishment and expansion of higher educational institutions in West Africa. Participants will discuss the impact of such land gifts, grants, and cessions on the design, construction, and uses of space on and around the campuses, as well as the socio-spatial relationships between communities and institutions resulting from these. Organized by Prof. Łukasz Stanek and Dr. Kuukuwa Manful, the symposium will facilitate an international comparative perspective on the histories of land “gifted” or “granted” by indigenous people to educational institutions.

March 28, 2025
Ann Arbor, MI

Time: 3-6pm
Location: Weiser Hall

Winter 2025 UMAPS Research Colloquium Series:

Innovations and Transformations in Sustainable Development: Energy, Economy, and Environmental Solutions in Africa

Speakers:
Michael Dziwornu

A highlight of the U-M African Presidential Scholars (UMAPS) program, the Research Colloquium Series offers the scholars an opportunity to formally present their work.

March 31, 2025
Ann Arbor, MI

The Comparative Gesture: Jennifer Robinson and Christian Schmid

Time: 12-1:30pm
Location: Taubman College Commons

Speakers:
Jennifer Robinson, Christian Schmid

A discussion with Jennifer Robinson and Christian Schmid about their recent books on urban comparative research, with particular focus on African cities.

Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography, University College London, UK. She is the author of Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006), a seminal work which developed a postcolonial critique of urban studies, and Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies (2023). The latter book proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. Her empirical research in South Africa examined the history of apartheid cities and the politics of post-apartheid city-visioning, while her comparative research has considered urban development politics in London, Shanghai and Johannesburg, and transnational circuits shaping African urbanization.

Christian Schmid is an urban researcher, geographer and sociologist, Professor of Sociology, Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He is a is a member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). His research focuses on planetary urbanization, comparative urban analysis and theories of urbanization and of space. His recent books include Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison (ed. with Monika Streule), which rethinks cartography as an instrument for the analysis of urbanization processes (2023), and Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space (2022), a reconstruction of Lefebvre's theory of space and of the urban.

April 16, 2025
Ann Arbor, MI

Time: 3-6pm
Location: Weiser Hall

Winter 2025 UMAPS Research Colloquium Series:

Cultural Dynamics and Social Transformation: Exploring Identity, Expression, and Resilience in Africa

Speakers:
Clint Abrahams

A highlight of the U-M African Presidential Scholars (UMAPS) program, the Research Colloquium Series offers the scholars an opportunity to formally present their work.

Archived

November 13, 2024
Ann Arbor, MI

The Gift Exhibition: A Debate

Time: 11am-1pm
Location: TV Lab

Speakers:
Ayisha Ida Baffoe-Ashun,
Temuulen Enkhbat, Alice Korkor Ebeheakey, Uurtsaikh Sangi,
Leigh House, Łukasz Stanek
Topics:
Oblique Histories, Land
Imaginaries

The gift-giving of buildings is an overarching force of worldwide urbanization today. Corporate and personal philanthropy has been a vital and controversial agent in European and North American cities, while inhabitants of African, Asian, and South American cities are increasingly concerned about their social and technical infrastructure being overdependent on European, American, or Chinese donors. This event will reflect on the exhibition The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture (Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich) which shows how uneven negotiations around the moral, temporal, and racial dynamics of gift-giving have shaped and continue to shape urbanization processes in four cities: East Palo Alto (USA), Skopje (Macedonia), Kumasi (Ghana), and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia).

November 12, 2024
Ann Arbor, MI

The Chronopolitics of Quantification: Economic Planning, Financial Auditing and Political Theology in 1960s Ghana

Time: 1:15pm-3:45pm
Location: Room 3146 A&AB

Speakers:
Gerardo Serra

Dr. Gerardo Serra (Lecturer in Economic Cultures, University of Manchester), will discuss his paper "The Chronopolitics of Quantification: Economic Planning, Financial Auditing and Political Theology in 1960s Ghana," which reconstructs the role of development planning and financial auditing in shaping political iconographies in 1960s Ghana. In it, Serra suggests that these tools (and the numbers contained in them) did not simply inform and support practices of economic management. Instead, they contributed to the construction of alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism. The focus is on the last years of Nkrumah’s government, until he was overthrown by a military coup d’état in 1966, and on the brief experience of the National Liberation Council (NLC), the military junta that ruled over Ghana between 1966 and 1969 (and which remains one of the least studied periods in the country’s postcolonial history).

October 18, 2024
Ann Arbor, MI

Fall 2024 UMAPS Research Colloquium Series:

Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Green Infrastructure in Ghanaian Cities Through Precolonial, Colonial, Contemporary Epochs

Time: 3-6pm
Location: Weiser Hall

Speakers:
Ayisha Ida Baffoe-Ashun

Topics:
Urban Planning,
Land Imaginaries,
The Sociopolitics of
the Built Environment

This presentation explores the socio-spatial distribution of urban green infrastructure in two of Ghana's major cities, Accra and Kumasi, focusing on the historical impact of colonial and post-colonial town planning on its contemporary distribution. The research investigates the influence of urban planning policies across three key periods—precolonial, colonial, and contemporary—and their influence on green space equity, public health, and environmental justice. The presentation will also address the need for new strategies to foster urban green infrastructure planning and development in Ghana's rapidly urbanising cities for human well-being and environmental sustainability.

April 11, 2024
Ann Arbor

Oblique Histories: Nigerian Indigenous Architecture With and Against Zbigniew Dmochowski

Speakers:
Warebi Brisibe, Kathryn Ciancia, Łukasz Stanek, Adedoyin Teriba

Topics:
Oblique Histories, Archival
Justice

The symposium traces the oblique trajectories of the comprehensive study of Indigenous (“traditional”) architecture in Nigeria carried out by a Nigerian-Polish team between the 1950s and the 1970s. Symposium participants questioned this study’s contribution to the decolonization of architecture in Nigeria, and its ongoing appropriation by Nigerian educators, architects, and scholars.

January 29, 2024
Ann Arbor

Radical Planning Speaker Series: Climate Mitigation and Just Disaster Action

Speakers:
Tim Berke, Apil KC

In this presentation, Apil KC shared about his experience as a young planner post-disaster and some of what he learned from post-disaster reconstruction. Apil opened the discussion by poking some of the issues in post-disaster reconstruction in Nepal that he has witnessed that are interesting to discuss and take in comparison with cases from other experiences. Tim discussed the potential roles and skills that planners can bring to humanitarian settings, using specific examples from his experience in South Sudan.

January - March 2024
London, United Kingdom

Building Africa Exhibition

Curators:
Kuukuwa Manful, Julia Gallagher
Topics:
The Sociopolitics of the Built Environment

"Building Africa" showcased compelling stories about political institutions and identities across the continent, using architectural landmarks such as presidential palaces, courts, parliaments, schools, sports stadiums, airports, and the African Union building. The exhibition underscored how these structures play a pivotal role in shaping political landscapes. Architectural design teams from Ethiopia (Nahom Teklu), South Africa (Matri-Archi(tecture)), and Ghana (Lois Quartey & Augustine Owusu Ansah) crafted installations that initially debuted in Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, and Accra. The London exhibition was designed by Kuukuwa Manful.

July 7, 2023
Asutsuare, Ghana

Discussion: Asutsuare Rebound

Speakers:
Paulina Addison, Michael Gameli Dziwornu, Eric Don-Arthur, Vida Otoo, Łukasz Stanek

Topics:
Archival Justice, Oblique
Histories, Land Imaginaries

After Ghana’s independence in 1957, the village of Asutsuare became the focus of state-led, socialist-inspired agricultural and industrial development. A sugar factory was built, along with a residential area, a sugarcane plantation, and an irrigation system. Twenty years after its closure in the 1980s, the plant was bought by Chinese investors. Today, it manufactures paper and plastic products, while the sugar cane plantation was repurposed for the farming of rice, bananas, and fish. Asutsuare Rebound, first presented at the Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture (2022), studies the reuse, reappropriation, and revalorisation of modernist planning in Asutsuare. We have interviewed retired employees of the sugar factory and younger inhabitants who explained to us how the material infrastructure and memories of the plant are a resource for imagining and producing a collective future. By juxtaposing their voices with images by photographer Eric Don-Arthur, this project revisits the ambiguous impact of long-term planning on the landscapes of Asutsuare, including water management, agriculture, and social infrastructure. We understand these ambiguities not as evidence of failure, but as an invitation to rethink the future beyond both modernist techno-utopias and neoliberal short-termism.

May 22 - 25, 2023
Asutsuare, Ghana

PhD Workshop: Building West Africa. A View from the Unilever Archive

Speakers:
Warebi Brisibe, Iain Jackson, Kuukuwa Manful, Łukasz Stanek, Claire Tunstall, Nwola Uduku,
Rixt Woudstra, Albena Yaneva

Topics:
Archival Justice

During this workshop, PhD students from the University of Michigan and the University of Manchester discussed architecture and construction in decolonizing Anglophone West Africa based on the records of African businesses owned by Unilever and preserved at the company archives in Port Sunlight, Merseyside.

Taubman College of Architecture and Planning

AfricaAlliance@umich.edu

Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning

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