Human-Centred Streets: The Proven Way to Reclaim African Urban Sociability
Every city tells a story through its streets. They reveal how people live, how they meet, and what they value. In much of contemporary urbanism, the street has been stripped of meaning. It has become an instrument of movement rather than a medium of connection. Yet in the towns and cities of West and North-West […]
Biophilic Design: The Proven Way to Shape Sustainable African Communities
A city breathes when its architecture remembers nature. Too often, our modern buildings forget this. They stand aloof, smooth-faced and sterile, as though ashamed of the earth that birthed them. Yet the human mind seeks pattern, texture, and the slow irregularities of growth. Biophilic design aims to answer that longing. At its heart lies a […]
Open-Source Urbanism: The Proven Way to Empower African City Builders
Urban design cannot succeed if knowledge remains locked behind bureaucracy. The tools of planning must be shared, adapted, and co-created. In West and Northwest Africa, open-source frameworks offer a path towards equitable and resilient cities—ones that return agency to local hands while embracing sustainable, place-based practices. Bamboo, laterite, rammed earth, and reclaimed timber are not […]
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, […]