Introduction

The Pan-African Biennale of Architecture represents an unprecedented opportunity to reclaim Africa’s architectural narrative, reasserting the continent’s role as a global leader in urban resilience, sustainability, and cultural expression. The biennale will offer a platform for African architects, designers, urban planners, and policymakers to engage in an important dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of urbanization, climate change, and economic transformation in Africa’s rapidly growing cities. It will become a space where African solutions are celebrated, challenging both global perspectives and architectural paradigms that have long shaped Africa’s built environment. The biennale offers a space for Africa to re-centre itself in the global architectural discourse — not as a peripheral observer or passive recipient, but as a generative force behind sustainable, equitable, and culturally grounded practices. It marks a transformation in how African architecture is conceived and produced — anchored in Indigenous knowledge systems, inventive methodologies, and community-driven design.

Curatorial Statement 

Shifting the Center – from Fragility to Resilience: Reclaiming Africa’s Architecture and the Future.

Africa was the origin of life, not only biologically, but culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. Its centrality must now be reclaimed in shaping global futures. For too long, Africa’s built environment has been viewed through an external lens— shaped by colonial occupation, redefined by Western development ideologies, and systemically excluded from the dominant narratives of architectural modernity. This Biennale marks a decisive shift. It repositions Africa not at the periphery of global architectural discourse, but at its centre — not merely as a recipient of models and technologies, but as a site of spatial intelligence, epistemic innovation, and future-making. At the core of this curatorial vision is the concept of fragility — not as a passive state of vulnerability, but as a spatial and historical condition shaped by colonization, displacement, economic extraction, and environmental precarity. African cities and communities, from informal settlements to postcolonial capitals, are deeply marked by these layered forms of fragility. Yet within this condition lie profound acts of resilience: Adaptive vernacular practices, cultural continuity under erasure, and the reinvention of urban life in contexts of abandonment. This Biennale asks: How can we design through fragility? 

How might architecture and urbanism emerge as tools not only of resistance or repair, but of transformation? In reframing fragility as a generative lens, we open space for a discourse that is rooted in African realities — one that interrogates inherited spatial orders while proposing radical and grounded futures. Decolonization is not a symbolic gesture — it is a material project. It requires dismantling imported standards of aesthetics, function, and value, and reviving indigenous and diasporic spatial logics. It calls for a re-reading of history, a reactivation of cultural memory, and the creation of new vocabularies of form and practice that respond to both place and people. From Fragility to Resilience is not a linear path but a dialectic between memory and innovation, repair and speculation, survival and imagination. 

This Biennale becomes a platform for African architects, thinkers, and communities to not only reclaim authorship over their built environments but to shape global conversations on sustainability, identity, and the futures of urban life. Africa has always been a site of architectural knowledge, rooted not in abstraction, but in land, community, animals, and ancestral memory. Its vernacular traditions embody centuries of adaptation to climate, resource cycles, and collective life. Architecture in Africa has long been shaped by oral histories, communal labor, and a belief that sees no separation between shelter and ecology, structure and spirit. In this sense, the very fragility that defines many African contexts today — whether material, social, or historical — contains within it the principles the world now urgently seeks: sustainability, mutuality, and resilience. What this moment demands is not emergence, but return — a return to the centre, on Africa’s terms. In the overlooked and the erased, in the fragile and the improvised, lies the architecture of the future.

Africa’s Fragility: From Colonialism to Contemporary Resilience

Africa’s fragility has long been mischaracterized as weakness by the Western world — yet it is precisely this fragility that has shaped the continent’s deep capacity to adapt, transform, and innovate. Nairobi, host city of this first edition of the Biennale, is a crossroads of cultural memory, political discourse, and architectural experimentation. Kigali has moved through the trauma of its past to become a reference point for urban regeneration and sustainable governance. Mogadishu, after years of conflict, is not rebuilding what was lost — it is becoming a new city, one that reclaims its identity through space, memory, and local resilience. Accra continues to assert itself through community-led design and cultural production, resisting imported models in favour of its rhythms and realities. These cities — each complex, each in motion — remind us that Africa is not only recovering: it is reshaping the future.

In 2023, the African diaspora sent $90.2 billion USD in remittances to the continent, a staggering contribution to Africa’s development. This financial flow highlights the immense power of the diaspora in shaping Africa’s future, and its role in transforming Africa’s built environment. The diaspora’s investments are reinvigorating cities, creating new spaces for cultural expression, urban regeneration, and economic growth. The resilience emerging from Africa’s cities is increasingly driven by local and diasporic forces, shaping an African future that is grounded in its solutions and values.

As Kwame Nkrumah said, “It is clear that we must find an African solution to our problems, and that this can only be found in African unity. Divided, we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world.” This biennale will demonstrate the power of African unity, diasporic leadership, and local solutions in shaping Africa’s resilient cities.

Kenya’s Role: A Symbol of Pan-African Leadership

Kenya offers more than geographic centrality—it brings historical depth, political relevance, and cultural vision to the task of hosting the first Pan-African Biennale of Architecture. Its capital, Nairobi, has long been a crossroads of resistance, exchange, and continental dialogue. As a political ally of liberation movements and a diplomatic centre in East Africa, Kenya has contributed significantly to the shaping of post-independence African identity. Hosting the first edition of the biennale here affirms that legacy and invites a new generation to engage architecture as a tool of cultural affirmation and spatial justice. Nairobi is emblematic of the contemporary African city — dynamic, layered, and unresolved. Its urban fabric holds the visible tensions of informality and regulation, colonial inheritance and local adaptation, speculation and survival. These complexities are not anomalies; they are realities shared across African cities. Nairobi becomes, therefore, not just a host, but a mirror — one that reflects the very questions the biennale seeks to confront: Who gets to design? What histories do we build upon? How can architecture express resilience, belonging, and transformation? To place the biennale here for it’s inaugural event is to reclaim this space, not as a monument to the past, but as a living stage for future discourse. The choice of Kenya, Nairobi, and the KICC is deliberate. It reflects a commitment to grounding African architectural dialogue in places shaped by real struggle, memory, and invention. This is not simply about geography or infrastructure but about positioning the biennale in a context that demands relevance. It is about asserting that the future of African architecture will not be imported, but imagined from within: rooted in the continent’s diverse realities and informed by its histories of design, resistance, and renewal.Reclaiming Africa’s Built Environment: From Fragility to Resilience

The Western world loves African architecture — as long as it is a Safari lodge.

This biennale will provide a platform for every African nation to participate in the global conversation on urbanism, resilience, and sustainability, having the opportunity to share with the world the richness of diversity of the continental architecture landscape. Each African country will be represented through panels, exhibitions, and discussions that highlight the innovative architectural solutions emerging across the continent. From vernacular design in rural settlements to megacities reimagining urban futures, the biennale will showcase Africa’s diversity in architectural practice. It will amplify the continent’s ability to respond to climate change, sustainably grow cities, and reclaim its built environment in a way that reflects African values. 

The Pan-African Architecture Biennale will shift the centre by showcasing African-led solutions and reaffirming that Africa does not need Western validation. The West, with its colonial legacy, has often positioned itself as the arbiter of what is modern, sustainable, and civilized. This biennale rejects those frameworks and places Africa at the centre of the global architectural discourse. It will highlight African innovation in sustainable design, resilient cities, and cultural preservation, offering the world a new model for urbanism.

Conclusion

Africa at the Centre.

This biennale is not just an event; it is a movement—a bold declaration that Africa leads in sustainable architecture, climate resilience, and urban transformation. Africa is the centre — it has always been, and it always will be. Africa’s built environment will shape the future of cities, not based on Western ideals or foreign models, but on African solutions, African wisdom, and African ingenuity. Africa’s fragility has become its strength, and this biennale will demonstrate how Africa’s future resilience is grounded in local solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Africa does not need the West to determine its architectural future — Africa is the centre, and this biennale will place Africa at the heart of the global architectural stage. The fragility of Africa’s cities will no longer be a mark of weakness — it will be the foundation of resilience. Africa is leading the way, and this biennale will demonstrate how Africa’s solutions will shape the future of global cities.