Land, Deed, and Debt: University Campuses in West Africa
Workshop
March 27, 2025
9:30am-5:30pm
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning: Commons
2000 Bonisteel Blvd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
The Land, Deed, and Debt workshop examines the consequences of the “ceding,” “gifting,” and “granting” of land by Indigenous communities for the establishment and expansion of higher education institutions in colonial and post-independence West Africa. Participants study how these often-forced land transfers have shaped the design, construction, and use of space on and around campuses, as well as the socio-spatial relationships between communities and universities. Organized by Łukasz Stanek and Kuukuwa Manful, the workshop fosters an international comparative perspective on the histories of land transferred by Indigenous peoples to educational institutions.
Topics:
Land Imaginaries
Convenors:
Kuukuwa Manful and Łukasz Stanek
Friends:
African Studies Center, University of Ghana at Legon, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Kumasi), University of Lagos.
Speakers:
Kwasi Kwafo Adarkwa attended the elite Mfantsipim School, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), University of British Columbia and Michigan State University. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Planning at the KNUST where he has spent virtually all his working life teaching and conducting research in planning and development problems. He has published widely in some mainstream journals including Cities, Land Use Policy, Property Management, African Review of Economics and Finance, African Transport Studies, Journal of Advanced Transportation, and others. In addition, he has edited two books on Kumasi and one on service delivery in Ghanaian human settlements. Apart from being a former Head of the Department of Planning and Dean of the Faculty of Environmental and Development Studies at the KNUST, he served as Pro Vice-Chancellor (2002-2006) and Vice-Chancellor of the KNUST (2006-2010). Currently, he serves as Chairman of the Board of the Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority of Ghana, Chairman of the Governing Council of the Institute of Local Government Studies, Chairman of the Governing Councils of the Agogo Presbyterian Women's College of Education, University College of Agriculture and Environmental Studies as well as the Kessben University College. He has just completed his autobiography entitled "Against All Odds."
of University of Lagos, Nigeria
Taibat Lawanson is Leverhulme Professor of Planning and Heritage at the University of Liverpool. Previously, she was Professor of urban management and governance at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. Taibat Lawanson is an urban planning and development specialist and is well known for her inter-sectoral work which engages policy makers, local communities and civil society actors. Her research focuses on the interface of social complexities, urban poverty and the quest for spatial justice in Africa. She leads the newly established African Urbanism and Heritage Lab at the Architecture Heritage and Urbanism of West Africa (AHUWA) Research Centre of the University of Liverpool. The Lab project objective is to, through an interdisciplinary lens, investigate the dual threat of rapid globalisation and climate change particularly related to West Africa’s coastal urban built environment, cultural heritage and the socio-economic livelihoods of the most vulnerable. She is a pioneer World Social Science Fellow of the International (Social) Science Council, Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners, Global Research Fellow of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and an alumna of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre.
Michael Gameli Dziwornu is a research scientist with the CSIR-Institute for Scientific and Technological Information (CSIR-INSTI), a public research organization in Ghana. He is particularly interested in crime geography, geographic information systems (GIS), urban studies, migration studies, and the postcolonial geographies of Africa. Michael joined CSIR-INSTI in June 2021 after completing his PhD in Urban Studies from the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy. Michael’s doctoral thesis focused on the containerization of urban space where he epistemologically deconstructed containerization from global political economy to critical urban studies. During his doctoral studies, he became a visiting research scholar at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and HTW Berlin- University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Michael is an alumnus of Suleyman Demirel University in Isparta Turkey in 2017, where he pursued an M.A. in Geography. Michael was also an Erasmus Mundus exchange student at the Pedagogical University of Krakow in Poland, where he researched the geographies of industrial transformation in postsocialist countries. Michael has a B.A. in Geography and Resource Development from the University of Ghana, Legon in 2013. Between 2014 and 2015, Michael served as a research assistant with the Centre for Migration Studies of the University of Ghana.
Trained as both historian and computer engineer, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi’s research into the history of West African cities combines a set of interdisciplinary interests in maps, mapmaking, and digital humanities. Her 2024 book, Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place and Politics in a 19th Century African City, explores the city’s 19th century history, rebuilding its past as a series of encounters: between men and women, between past and present, enslaved and free, Eko (the old town) and Lagos, and between the land and lagoons. The maps and data sources are available online at imaginelagos.com. Her academic writing has focused on Lagos, digital humanities, women and space, and mapmaking, and in 2019, her maps and research were funded in Journey of an African Colony, a Netflix documentary. Her research has been funded by the Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson and Hellman foundations She teaches classes on Africa, urban history, and data storytelling at Howard University, where she is an Associate Professor of History. Prior to joining Howard, she was an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, and Associate Professor of History at UC Riverside. For more on her maps and visualizations of Lagos, visit newmapsoldlagos.com. She received her PhD in History from NYU in 2016.
Kuukuwa Manful is a trained architect and researcher who creates, studies and documents architecture in Africa. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. Her current projects include a book about The Architecture of Education in Ghana and a study of the Formalisation and Unformalisation of Architecture in West Africa using a collection of endangered archives that she has recently digitised. She was previously a visiting post-doctoral scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a post-doctoral researcher on the African State Architecture Project at SOAS, University of London. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and Masters and BSc Architecture degrees from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Her academic publications, creative writing, and public scholarship have appeared in African Affairs, Al Jazeera, Aperture, Curator: The Museum Journal, and Tampered Press. She has exhibited at and curated several art and architecture exhibitions around the world including recently in Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana and the United Kingdom. Her most recent publications include the co-edited book Building African Futures: 10 Manifestos for Transformative Architecture and Urbanism, published by Iwalewa books; and “Building Classes: Secondary Schools and Sociopolitical Stratification in Ghana” which was awarded the 2023 ASA Graduate Student Paper Prize.
Łukasz Stanek is Professor at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He also holds a dry appointment at the Department of History, University of Michigan. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). The latter won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2020), among other prizes. His edited volumes include Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Team 10 East. Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014) and Urban Revolution Now (Ashgate, 2014, with Ákos Moravánszky and Christian Schmid). Previously Stanek taught at the Swiss Federal University of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland), and the University of Manchester (UK), and he was guest professor at Harvard University (USA), and the University of Ghana at Legon in Accra (Ghana). He was a fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington DC, USA), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, Canada), and the Institute d’Urbanisme (Paris, France). He curated several exhibitions, including The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture (Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich, 2024). Stanek received a Master of Architecture from Kraków University of Technology, Master of Philosophy from the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland), and a Ph.D. from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.
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