The Gift of a Lease: The KNUST Campus and Its Environs
Łukasz Stanek
In 1952, the Principal of the College of Technology, then under construction by the colonial government in Kumasi, expressed gratitude to the king of the Asante people for the “generous gift […] of 4 square miles of forest country with 2 square miles in reserve for development.” At the time when the legal status of the land was still being negotiated by the colonial government, the Principal’s speech was one of the first to suggest a moral economy that made the College indebted not only to the king but also to the chiefs, the farmers, and the broader communities who had used the land before the construction of the campus. In this talk, I will show how, in the decades that followed, this moral economy mediated between the planning of the campus and its surroundings, as put forward by the university administrators on the one hand, and, on the other, the alternative futures for this territory pursued by the communities. In so doing, I will show how the production of campus spaces and those around it were intrinsically intertwined and how the communities participated in their negotiation. This talk will clarify how these negotiations responded to, challenged, modified, and reshaped the spaces of the campus and its surroundings and continue to do so to this day.
Bio:
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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