Archive

AHUWA

The Transnational Architecture Group is 10 year’s old this year. Thank you for supporting the blog and to all of our excellent contributors over the years for enriching the content and generously sharing their work. We’d also like to thank the communities in the places in which we work, the archivists and librarians for making material available to us and sharing their expertise, our respective institutions for supporting our research, and to the research funders who make travel, time, and resources available to us.

The blog started as a means to share our work-in-progress ideas and to promote events – and that is still at the core of what we do. We continue to add updates from our ventures into the archives, travel reports, and to share interesting events and innovative papers. These small reports and updates have compounded into something of a large resource and repository, and we’re delighted so many people have been able to make good use of (and to correct and expand upon) our work and attempts at writing these histories.

To celebrate the 10 year anniversary we held a small gathering at the Liverpool School of Architecture on Wednesday 8th March, curated and organised by Dr Alistair Cartwright. Our speakers were all PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and research associates at the school. You may watch the proceedings here:

https://stream.liv.ac.uk/fkzj2h9j

The speakers and titles of the presentations are below, with timings if you’d like to skip to a particular talk:

Rixt Woudstra, “Sapele and Samreboi: Building Company Towns in British West Africa” 5:25

Excy Hansda, “Indigenous Modernities in the Twentieth Century Architecture of Bombay” 20:00

Adefola Toye, “Tropical Modernism in Nigeria’s First Universities: Accessing Sources Beyond the Archives.” 37:00

Ewan Harrison, “Planning for Post/Neo Coloniality: the Paramount Hotel in Freetown” 1:11

Iain Jackson, “Erhabor Emokae and the curious case of the UAC Mural: tropical modernism and decorative arts” 1:31

Daneel Starr, “How and why has the vernacular architecture and intangible cultural heritage of the Akha people changed in the face of globalization: Using the village of A Lu Lao Zhai, Xishuangbanna (sipsongpanna) China, as a case study.” 1:50

Paul Robinson, “Freetown, the UAC and urban design” 2:20

Alistair Cartwright, “Ecologies of Vulnerability: Post-Cyclone Reconstruction in Mauritius, c. 1945” 2:35

We also heard an excellent paper from Razan Simbawa, “The Effects of Demolish-based Urban Regeneration on Displaced Residents in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia” – which cannot be shared on the video recording at the moment.

Thank you again to all of the speakers for their wonderful talks, presentations, and work-in-progress. There was such variety and richness in the topics and methods, and at the same time numerous connections and cross-overs between the work.

Please do get in touch if you’d like to know more, or to share your work on the blog.

AHUWA LAUNCH  13TH DECEMBER 2022

The Architectural History and Urbanism Research centre for Western Africa, AHUWA, was launched on Tuesday 13th December at the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. The launch involved a presentation of the research centre by the co-directors Professors Iain Jackson and Ola Uduku, about the key research themes, aims and ambitions of the AHUWA research centre followed by a short networking session over refreshments during the event. In attendance were invited members of the Liverpool university faculty and departments who had interests or links to West African Architecture and Urbanism history research, members of the local Liverpool community with African links, and a number of Architecture staff and post-graduate students. We were also pleased to welcome a representative from the Andrew Walls Centre from Liverpool Hope University and a host of academics who logged in online from the UK, West Africa, the USA and farther afield.

The key themes which AHUWA will focus on are:

  • Architectural and Urban History
  • West African Coastal Heritage
  • Sustainable and Healthy Cities   [SDGs 11 and
  • Research outreach and collaboration via
    • Trans-national university collaborations
    • Writing workshops
    • Public outreach and engagement activities

Our aims and objectives are:

  • To be a repository and hub to consult for links to researchers and research collections pertaining to West Africa in North West England
  • To host and develop links with researchers in the North West of England and West Africa in order to promote future collaborative research links
  • Ultimately and importantly  to strengthen research networks and institutions in West Africa through their collaboration with UK institutions from PG research and teaching  opportunities to the collaboration and co-production of major research consultancy, and other potential outputs.

We are working in association with several collaborators including:

  • UCL and UCT (Modernist Heritage of Africa Project)
  • ACRC (University of Manchester) – the African Cities Research Consortium
  • DOCOMOMO International. (Shared Heritage Project)
  • ASAUK –  Curating the proceedings and publication of the Online  ASAUK Biennial conference 2022
  • UNILEVER – on the United Africa Company archive

We are in the process of undertaking the following:

  • Setting up MoU’s and working relations with colleagues at the IADS University of Lagos and  IAAS University of Ghana, Legon.
  • Production of the first AHUWA newsletter in March/April 2023
  • Establishing links with the School of Architecture, Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone
  • Undertaking scoping research in Freetown Sierra Leone
  • Working towards developing collaborative research grants within the scope of AHUWA’s research thematic areas.

Best wishes for Christmas and 2023.