Cluster-Based Planning: The Key to Better Urban Living
“Architecture is not the outcome of drawings but of lived choices shaped around place, ritual and rhythm.” Cities across West and Northwest Africa are expanding fast. Too often, that growth flattens local identity, fragments community life, and intensifies ecological pressure. Yet it need not. The urban cluster offers a grounded alternative: compact, walkable, and materially […]
Bamboo Urbanism So Far: Powerful Takeaways and Surprising Lessons
The enthusiasm for bamboo in West African urban design has been both exhilarating and sobering. We’ve seen workshops, pilot blocks, and research units rise. We’ve heard declarations of a “new material age.” But what has this bamboo moment really taught us? It has taught us that no single material is a magic bullet. Bamboo is […]
Biophilic Urbanism: Designing Cities That Heal Us
Arashiyama Bamboo Grove in Kyoto, Japan In a world increasingly shaped by glass, steel and concrete, biophilic urbanism offers a quiet but essential idea: that our cities should not just house us—but heal us. They should be places where we breathe easier. Where trees and water aren’t decorative, but foundational. Where the built environment doesn’t […]
On Weald and Beam: A Song of Bamboo and Stone
Toward a future where our cities grow like forests, not factories “There is in bamboo a kind of nobility—quiet, resilient, and rooted in grace. It is the architecture of wind, of water, of Earth herself.”— Unknown The Quiet Magic of Bamboo: A Journey into Sustainable Construction In an age of soot-hung skies and concrete sprawl, […]