6000 years of African urbanism: The profile of a discipline of architecture and urbanism based on Pan Africanism

Abstract

6000 years of African urbanism: The profile of a discipline of architecture and urbanism based on Pan Africanism. Producing solutions is producing knowledge. The teaching of architecture and urbanism is the production of knowledge that allows us to find efficient solutions adapted to each location, culture and social history. Tropical soils and tropical climates imposed tropical agriculture and tropical livestock farming in the history of humanity that produced particular knowledge about tropical materials and technologies. These are references for understanding African urbanism and its history and its scientific uniqueness. Science and scientific knowledge is produced from philosophy, history and mathematical cognition. African science and scientific knowledge were based on the historical experiences of African thought. Pan africanimos reproduced and updated African thought and this spectacular result of African history produced by Africans and people of African descent illuminates the production of a history of African urbanism based on African concepts synthesized by pan Africanism. The discipline of African Urbanism from a pan-Africanist perspective has been taught at the Federal University of Bahia and the Federal University of Ceará since 2016 and the article proposed here is an overview of these disciplines focusing on the different regions of the continent and the different historical periods from a pan-Africanist perspective. This proposal can provoke reforms in the content of how to think about urbanism in tropical African and Brazilian regions from specific perspectives that differ from European ones. The basic reality of tropical soils and tropical technologies as well as tropic climates can change the perspectives of the approaches to problems and solutions. It may result in a broad conceptual review of African and Brazilian urbanism in the long term. The African and Brazilian regions are globally different based on the constitution of the soils and the morphology of the geographical spaces and rare discussions in the teaching of architecture and urbanism take this physical reality into account. This proposal for a historical discipline aims to impact changes in the way urban problems are approached in Brazilian and African societies.