About

The Pan-African Biennale is the first continent-wide institution for architecture, the built environment and spatial practice, conceived and intellectually authored by Africans and people of African descent, on the continent and beyond. It is a space where practitioners, researchers, students and communities share their research, debate and come together to reimagine the built environment. Through a biennale that moves to a different African city every two years, and through programmes, research and publications, it builds a permanent record of African spatial knowledge, freely shared, from Africa, for the world.

The Pan-African Biennale was founded in 2025 by Omar Degan, who conceived it as an idea: that Africans, on the continent and across its diasporas, deserved a platform of their own to define the discourse on architecture and the built environment, and to shape the future of their cities.

“This Biennale was not commissioned. It was not approved. It began the way necessary things begin, in conversation, between practitioners across this continent and its diaspora who had been waiting, each alone in their own city, for something like this to exist.”

Omar Degan, Founder and Executive Director · Foreword, Shifting the Centre, Edition I book

Africa has too often been described from the outside, as a fragile continent, a case study or a recipient of imported models. Its architects, thinkers and communities were producing knowledge, memory and spatial intelligence, but lacked a space to present it on their own terms. At the same time, a renewed Pan-African sentiment was rising, recalling the unity of the independence years. The Biennale was founded to answer both: to shift the centre of architectural discourse towards Africa, and to give the global African community a platform to author its own narratives.

The idea became a movement as architects, practitioners and supporters across Africa and beyond made it their own. Its first edition opened in Nairobi in September 2026, with all 54 African countries represented. The Biennale is now becoming a permanent institution, built to carry the founding idea forward across generations and cities.

The first edition was built by a team that gave months of its time and commitment. The Biennale thanks all former members who made it possible, each of them credited in the Edition I book.