Africa Alliance
Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning
Related Courses
Upcoming
ARCHITECTURE, URBAN HISTORY, AFRICAN HISTORY, AFRICAN DIASPORAS
History of Architecture I: The Architecture of Africa and African Diasporas
ARCH 313/413
Term: Fall 2024
Course Number:
10017
Section: 01
Credits: 3
Required: Yes
Elective: No
with
Dr. Kuukuwa Manful
This course examines histories, theories, and politics of architecture in, of, and from the African continent and its global diasporas. It uses a multidisciplinary approach with a range of conventional and unconventional sources to re-examine hegemonic (hi)stories of architecture towards extending or countering them. We will study various examples ranging from relatively well-documented, celebrated, and monumental examples of architecture to the more mundane, easily overlooked, and often forgotten. Although focused on Africa, the aspects of the built environment and peoples’ experiences with it that we explore through this course extend geographically and thematically around the world.
ARCHITECTURE, URBAN HISTORY, AFRICAN ARCHITECTURAL
HISTORY
Formal/Informal/Unformal
ARCH 509
Term: Fall 2024
Course Number:
25176
Section: 14
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes
with Dr. Kuukuwa Manful
This course examines and challenges a longstanding dichotomy in which the built environment is either thought of as ‘formal’ (i.e. produced by, legible to, and regulated by recognized professionals and institutions) or ‘informal’ (outside the purview of institutions of authority). We will investigate claims of detachment from context and meaning which the concepts of ‘form,’ ‘formal’, formalism, and formalization aspire to or emphasize; and interrogate foundational assumptions in architecture and urbanism, asking how, why, and when we get to formal(ized) built forms and typologies. Using approaches and methodologies such as critical fabulation, archival research, and case studies, we will explore contemporary and historical building types towards new and expanded frames of formal, informal, and ‘unformal’.
ARCHITECTURE, AFRICAN
HISTORY
Temporalities of Decolonization
ARCH 603/823
Term: Fall 2024
Course Number:
32742
Section: 4
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes
with
Łukasz Stanek
Decolonization in Africa and Asia has been often described, by historical actors and scholars alike, as a moment in which time accelerated and history sped up. This acceleration was measured against the schedules drafted by colonial administrators in London or Paris, who allocated decades to the steps in the transition to self-rule which African and Asian nationalist politicians wanted to measure in years or even months. That discrepancy alone reveals decolonization as a negotiation of conflicting temporalities put forward by various actors with competing agendas. Architecture, urban planning, and construction were often at the forefront of these negotiations, as they materialized in attempts to transform colonial cities into “modern” national capitals, in the reorganization of the everyday schedules of their inhabitants, and in the overarching acceleration of government investment programs across industry, education, culture, and housing. Architects, planners, engineers, contractors, and administrators, both colonial and Indigenous, found themselves synchronizing development between the cities and the countryside, phasing investments across various governmental departments, and coordinating construction schedules with agricultural rhythms and indigenous religious practices. In their attempts to speed up the processes of political, social, economic, and cultural decolonization, they sometimes faced more fundamental questions, notably about the possibility of decolonizing time beyond its measurements, experiences, and expectations inherited from the colonial period. After introducing the concept of time as a political idea, in this seminar we will use architecture as an entrance point to debating how competing temporalities were put forward, interpreted, shaped, and negotiated during the processes of decolonization in Western and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and South Asia since the 1940s.
ARCHITECTURE, AFRICAN
HISTORYArchitecture in Global Socialism
ARCH 603/823
Term: Winter 2025
Course Number: TBD
Section: TBD
Credits: TBD
Required: No
Elective: Yes
with
Łukasz Stanek
This course offers an alternative history of global urbanization and its architecture during the Cold War through the lens of socialist internationalism. By focusing on architectural exchanges between socialist countries and newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, and South America we will show the emergence of a world that is more urban and more global than ever before. We will study how local authorities and professionals in cities such as Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City drew on Soviet prefabrication systems, Hungarian and Polish planning methods, Yugoslav and Bulgarian construction materials, Romanian and East German standard designs, and manual laborers from across Eastern Europe. The seminar explores how the socialist development path was adapted to tropical conditions in Ghana in the 1960s, and how Eastern European architectural traditions were given new life in 1970s Nigeria. It looks at how the differences between socialist foreign trade and the emerging global construction market were exploited in the Middle East in the closing decades of the Cold War. In so doing, we will study how these and other practices of global cooperation by socialist countries left their enduring mark on urban landscapes in the postcolonial world. Several sessions will be co-taught with Dr Michael Dziwornu, University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar from Ghana.
Past Courses
ARCHITECTURE, URBAN HISTORY, AFRICAN HISTORY
African Urbanisms: Architectural Mobilities in the Long 20th Century
ARCH 603/823
Term: Fall 2023
Course Number:
38723
Section: 03
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective:
Yes
with
Łukasz Stanek
This course discusses architecture and urbanization in Africa during the 20th century from the point of view of mobilities of people, resources, and ideas. Starting with imperial networks and their intersections with local ecologies, we will expand the focus to new geographies emerging in the wake of World War II. These included diasporic, transatlantic, and Pan-African exchanges, as well as those triggered by decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization. After discussing instances of collaboration and of antagonism between actors mobilized in these networks and their impact on the built environment, we will focus on the city of Kumasi in Ghana, the former capital of the Ashanti Confederacy and the second largest city in independent Ghana. In particular, we will use digital mapping and oral history to study architecture and urbanization in and around the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science in Technology (KNUST). We will discuss the campus from its foundation by British and Asante elites in the early 1950s until today as deeply impacted by competing networks that straddled local, regional, continental, and planetary scales.
Taubman College of Architecture and Planning
AfricaAlliance@umich.edu