Afropolitan Architecture: Imagining the African Urban Future by Design

Abstract

In her curatorial provocation at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale of 2023, Lesley Lokko invited us into the ‘laboratory of the future’. She sought to frame the continent as a crucible of innovation and ingenuity, a testbed for combinations of objects and ideas; an experimental field characterised by the comparative youth, rising economies and increasing mobility of its 1.46 billion inhabitants, many of them living in cities. Exhibitors showcased alternative visions of real and imagined places. They set out to demonstrate different ways of knowing cities, capturing diverse subjectivities in order to express emergent urban strategies. The biennale changed the conversation by shifting its centre, establishing a basis for new dialogues about the African city. One such dialogue addresses the premise of an emergent tendency in debate concerning the role of design, as embodied in practices of architecture and urbanism, in defining what AbdouMaliq Simone has called the African ‘city-yet-to-come’ as the context for a nascent Afropolitanism. What does the concept of a future-facing laboratory mean for the emerging generation of city-makers and world-builders? What of the cohort of architects and urbanists whose proposals and practices will drive this metabolism of experimentation? Drawing upon a discussion series initiated by the authors at the Biennale, this paper develops an agenda for reframing design as a projective discipline for testing and cultivating alternative futures. The investigation mobilises Achille Mbembe’s account of ‘Afropolitanism’ as a corrective to assumptions concerning the geographies of worldliness and belonging in our age of global change