Where is the AFRAUHN conference taking place?

The AFRAUHN conference is scheduled to be held in Nairobi, KEN.

What is the primary focus of the AFRAUHN conference?

The conference focuses on African architectural and urban history, bringing together experts to discuss the historical evolution of urban spaces and architectural forms across the continent.

What type of event is AFRAUHN?

AFRAUHN is a bi-annual conference dedicated to African architectural and urban history, fostering academic and practical discussions in the field.

AFRAUHN Nairobi 2026

Name: AFRAUHN Nairobi 2026
Start: 2026-09-08T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-10T00:00:00Z
Location: Nairobi

Sep 8–10, 2026Nairobi, KenyaIn-person

Starts in 31 daysRegistration open

The AFRAUHN conference, hosted in Nairobi, KEN, serves as a significant forum for exploring the intricate relationship between African architectural and urban history. This event brings together academics, researchers, and practitioners to delve into the historical evolution of urban spaces and architectural forms across the African continent. By focusing on historical perspectives, the conference aims to deepen understanding of the foundations that shape contemporary African cities and their built environments.

Committees & topics

Topics
African Architectural Practices: Vernacular Traditions and Contemporary Production · African Urban Practices: Informality, Self-Build, and Everyday City-Making · African Architectural History: Recovering and Reframing the Built Record · African Urban Planning: Inherited Frameworks and Continental Reform · Regional Identity in Kenyan Architecture · Architectural Education in Africa: Curricula, Accreditation, and Decolonization · Historiographies of African Architecture and Urbanism · Tropical Architecture: Climate, Colonialism, and the Future of Low-Energy Design

Why it matters

Understanding the historical trajectory of African architecture and urbanism is crucial for informed future development. The conference provides a platform to examine how historical forces, cultural practices, and colonial legacies have influenced the physical and social fabric of African cities. This historical lens is vital for recognizing patterns, identifying sustainable practices rooted in local contexts, and avoiding the pitfalls of approaches that disregard the unique developmental paths of African urban centers. By fostering dialogue on these historical dimensions, the conference contributes to a more nuanced and context-sensitive approach to urban planning and architectural innovation.

Furthermore, the gathering in Nairobi, KEN, underscores the importance of local expertise and regional perspectives in shaping the discourse on African urban history. It offers an opportunity for scholars from various African nations and beyond to share research, methodologies, and interpretations, thereby enriching the collective understanding of the continent's diverse architectural heritage. This collaborative environment is essential for building a robust academic community dedicated to the study and preservation of African urban and architectural histories, ensuring that these narratives are told from within the continent and reflect its multifaceted realities.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the AFRAUHN conference should focus on engaging with the rich historical context of African urban development and architecture. Familiarity with key historical periods, influential architectural styles, and significant urban planning movements across different African regions will be beneficial. Understanding the impact of colonialism on urban forms and architectural expressions, as well as the resilience and adaptation of indigenous building practices, will provide a strong foundation for participation.

Attendees should also consider how historical analyses can inform contemporary challenges and opportunities in African cities. While the conference centers on history, insights gained from examining past urban transformations can offer valuable lessons for present-day policy and practice. Engaging with concepts such as "what-is-stakeholder-mapping" and "hidden-stakeholders" in historical contexts can reveal how different groups have influenced urban development over time. Additionally, exploring "engagement-strategies" and "dynamic-analysis" through a historical lens can illuminate the evolving relationships between communities, power structures, and the built environment.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Kenya

As the host nation, KEN offers a rich tapestry of historical urban development, from ancient Swahili city-states to colonial-era planning and post-independence growth.

Role in topic

KEN's capital, Nairobi, serves as a prime example of a city shaped by diverse historical influences, providing a living laboratory for discussions on African architectural and urban history. Its unique blend of indigenous, colonial, and modern architectural styles makes it a focal point for understanding urban evolution in East Africa.

Egypt

EGY contributes a long and continuous urban history, from ancient civilizations to Islamic and modern architectural developments, offering deep historical perspectives.

Role in topic

EGY's historical cities, such as Cairo, showcase millennia of urban planning and architectural innovation, providing critical case studies for understanding the deep roots of African urbanism and its continuous evolution.

Nigeria

NGA represents a diverse range of urban histories, including pre-colonial kingdoms, colonial administrative centers, and rapidly expanding contemporary metropolises.

Role in topic

With cities like Lagos, NGA offers insights into the complexities of rapid urbanization intertwined with historical legacies, providing examples of how traditional urban forms have adapted or been transformed by modern pressures.

South Africa

ZAF's urban history is marked by unique challenges and developments, including the impact of apartheid on spatial planning and the subsequent efforts towards urban integration and transformation.

Role in topic

Cities in ZAF, such as Cape Town and Johannesburg, provide crucial examples of how political systems have profoundly shaped urban landscapes and architectural expressions, offering lessons on historical injustices and ongoing efforts for equitable urban development.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

African Architectural Practices: Vernacular Traditions and Contemporary Production

African architectural practice spans an enormous range of traditions, from the earthen mosque-building lineages of the Sahel and the coral-stone construction of the Swahili coast to the Cape Dutch hybrids of southern Africa and the modernist experiments of post-independence capitals. Across the continent, building practice has historically been organized around guilds, kin-based mason groups, and patron-led commissions, with materials and techniques (rammed earth, laterite, thatch, timber, stone) tightly tied to local ecologies. Colonial administrations imposed European typologies and professional regulation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, displacing indigenous masters and creating the bifurcated profession—formal architects versus 'informal' builders—that still shapes the sector. Since independence, African architectural practice has oscillated between imported modernism, state-led monumentalism, and renewed interest in vernacular intelligence. The 1980s structural adjustment era weakened public commissioning, pushing many firms toward private residential and commercial work. From the 2000s, a new generation of practitioners—Diébédo Francis Kéré, David Adjaye, Mariam Issoufou, Kunlé Adeyemi, Mphethi Morojele, among others—has gained international visibility while wrestling with familiar constraints: thin local material industries, dependence on foreign consultants for large public projects, and registration regimes that exclude artisans. Today the debate centers on how to value and protect indigenous building knowledge, how to localize supply chains and labor, and how professional bodies should regulate practice without entrenching colonial-era hierarchies. Questions of authorship, climate adaptation, and the role of African firms in delivering housing at scale dominate continental discussion.

Key players

African Urban Practices: Informality, Self-Build, and Everyday City-Making

African cities are, in demographic terms, the fastest-growing in the world, and the bulk of their fabric is produced outside formal planning systems. Urban practices on the continent therefore encompass not only municipal administration and master planning but also the self-built neighborhoods, street economies, matatu and danfo transport networks, faith-based land allocation, and customary tenure regimes through which most residents actually access the city. These practices have deep historical roots in pre-colonial trading towns (Kano, Timbuktu, Lamu, Great Zimbabwe) but were profoundly disrupted by colonial segregation ordinances that produced the dual city—planned European cores and underserved 'native' quarters—whose legacy persists in zoning, infrastructure investment, and land law. Post-independence governments inherited these dualities and often reinforced them through modernist master plans and slum clearance. From the 1970s onward, scholars and practitioners (notably AbdouMaliq Simone, Edgar Pieterse, and the African Centre for Cities) began reframing informal practices as legitimate urbanism rather than deficit, and international agencies shifted toward in-situ upgrading. The rise of Chinese-financed new cities, gated estates, and special economic zones in the 2000s introduced a competing model of speculative, enclave-based urban production. Current debates focus on how municipalities can co-produce services with informal settlements, how to regulate ride-hailing and paratransit, climate resilience in flood-prone peri-urban zones, and whether 'smart city' projects like Konza, Eko Atlantic, or Diamniadio deliver inclusive growth or accelerate displacement.

Key players

African Architectural History: Recovering and Reframing the Built Record

African architectural history has long been distorted by colonial-era scholarship that treated sub-Saharan building as ethnographic curiosity rather than architecture, dismissed monumental sites like Great Zimbabwe as foreign in origin, and centered North African heritage within an 'Islamic' or 'Mediterranean' canon detached from the rest of the continent. Yet the actual record is exceptionally deep: Nubian pyramids and Aksumite stelae, Lalibela's rock-hewn churches, the Swahili stone towns of Kilwa and Lamu, the Hausa city walls and palaces of Kano and Zaria, the Djenné mosque tradition, the Asante courtyard houses of Kumasi, and the Cape vernacular of the eighteenth century all attest to sophisticated, evolving architectural cultures. From the 1960s, scholars such as Labelle Prussin, Suzanne Blier, Nnamdi Elleh, and more recently Itohan Osayimwese and Ola Uduku have worked to dismantle the older framework, situating African architecture within global histories of trade, religion, and modernism. Independence-era and post-independence buildings—the universities of Ife and Lusaka, the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, FESTAC '77 infrastructure, La Pyramide in Abidjan—have become central to a reappraisal of tropical and African modernism. UNESCO listings, while protective, have also imposed framings that sometimes freeze living traditions. The current scholarly conversation revolves around archives (much material remains in former metropoles), pedagogy, the politics of restoration, and how to integrate oral, craft-based knowledge into formal architectural history.

Key players

African Urban Planning: Inherited Frameworks and Continental Reform

Formal urban planning in Africa was largely instituted under colonial rule, with British, French, Portuguese, and Belgian administrations importing garden-city, Haussmannian, and zoning models that segregated populations and prioritized export infrastructure over social provision. Post-independence states retained most of this legal and bureaucratic apparatus—plot-ratio controls, master plans on twenty-year cycles, centralized planning ministries—even as cities grew far beyond the conditions those instruments were designed for. The result has been a chronic mismatch between statutory plans and actual urban growth, with majorities of urban land developed outside formal approvals. Reform efforts have come in waves. The 1976 Vancouver Habitat conference and the founding of UN-Habitat in Nairobi placed African urbanization on the global agenda; the 1996 Istanbul agenda emphasized enablement; the New Urban Agenda (Quito, 2016) and the African Union's Agenda 2063 frame the current moment. Several countries have updated planning laws (South Africa's SPLUMA, Rwanda's land tenure regularization, Kenya's 2019 Physical and Land Use Planning Act), and city-region authorities have emerged in Lagos, Kigali, and Addis Ababa. Yet capacity gaps, weak municipal finance, and tension between national and local governments persist. Key debates concern devolution of planning authority, climate-sensitive land use, regularization of informal tenure, transit-oriented development, and how to plan for secondary cities, which will absorb much of the next wave of urbanization.

Key players

Regional Identity in Kenyan Architecture

Kenyan architecture sits at the intersection of Swahili coastal traditions, highland agrarian vernaculars, Indian Ocean trading influences, and a substantial colonial-era and post-independence modernist inheritance. The coral-rag and mangrove-timber architecture of Lamu and Mombasa, the timber-and-grass homesteads of Kikuyu, Luo, and Maasai communities, and the dressed-stone bungalows of the early colonial highlands together form a regional palette that has been only unevenly drawn upon by the formal profession. From the 1960s, architects such as Richard Hughes, David Mutiso, and the firm of Triad pursued a tropical-modernist idiom suited to Nairobi's climate, exemplified by the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (1973). The liberalization of the 1990s and the post-2000 construction boom shifted aesthetic preferences toward curtain-walled towers and Gulf- and Chinese-influenced commercial typologies, often disconnected from site, climate, and craft. A counter-movement has emerged through practitioners and educators advocating for stone, rammed earth, and timber, climate-responsive passive design, and engagement with coastal and rift-valley vernaculars. Institutions like the Board of Registration of Architects and Quantity Surveyors, the Architectural Association of Kenya, and university programs at Nairobi, JKUAT, and Kenyatta are central to this conversation. The contemporary debate concerns what 'Kenyan' or 'East African' architectural identity means in a globalized market, how devolution to forty-seven counties might enable regional architectural expression, and how heritage sites like Lamu—now under pressure from the LAPSSET corridor—should inform new building.

Key players

Architectural Education in Africa: Curricula, Accreditation, and Decolonization

Formal architectural education on the continent began with colonial-era institutions—the University of the Witwatersrand (1922), the Kumasi College of Technology (later KNUST, 1952), Ahmadu Bello and Ife in Nigeria, and the architecture program at the University of Nairobi (1969)—largely modeled on British or French curricula. Studios drew on European precedent, climate was treated as a technical add-on, and African building traditions appeared, if at all, as ethnographic content. Post-independence schools attempted reform, with figures like Demas Nwoko, Hannah Schreckenbach at KNUST, and the Ife school under Demas, Olumide Olumuyiwa, and others advocating regional grounding, but funding crises and brain drain from the 1980s undermined sustained change. Today there are roughly 130 architecture programs across Africa, with very uneven accreditation, library, and studio resources. The Commonwealth Association of Architects, the Africa Union of Architects, and the UIA Region V coordinate validation, while professional registration boards control entry to practice. Calls to decolonize curricula have intensified since the 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements in South Africa, pushing schools to revise reading lists, recenter African case studies, and rethink studio briefs. Digital pedagogy, accelerated during the pandemic, has both broadened access and exposed infrastructure gaps. Core debates concern mutual recognition of qualifications across the continent (linked to AfCFTA professional services protocols), the role of craft and build-studio pedagogy, and how to expand capacity given that the continent trains far too few architects for its urbanization trajectory.

Key players

Historiographies of African Architecture and Urbanism

How African architecture and urbanism have been written about is itself a contested terrain. Early European accounts—travelogues, colonial surveys, and works such as Frobenius's or those produced under the École française d'Afrique—framed African building as either timeless tradition or derivative of external (Arab, Portuguese, Indian) influence. Mid-twentieth-century texts like Udo Kultermann's New Architecture in Africa (1963) introduced the continent to a modernist international audience but often centered expatriate designers. Labelle Prussin's work from the 1970s onward, alongside Suzanne Blier, Nnamdi Elleh's African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation (1996), and the journal Docomomo's African dossiers, began to construct a more grounded scholarship. The 2000s and 2010s saw a substantial expansion: African Modernism (Herrle/Schmitz/Stollmann), Adjaye's African Metropolitan Architecture, Manuel Herz's work on liberation-era architecture, Ola Uduku and Iain Jackson on tropical modernism, and Itohan Osayimwese's German Colonialism and the Architecture of Memory. African-led platforms such as ArchiAfrika, Folio, and the African Centre for Cities have built institutional capacity for the field. Still, archives, journals, and tenure-bearing chairs remain concentrated in the global North. Current debates concern repatriation and digitization of colonial-era archives, the place of oral and craft knowledge in historiography, the canonization of post-independence modernism, and how to write urban histories that take informal city-making seriously as a primary object rather than an exception.

Key players

Tropical Architecture: Climate, Colonialism, and the Future of Low-Energy Design

'Tropical architecture' emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a self-conscious design discourse, codified at the 1953 conference on Tropical Architecture at University College London and developed at the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association under Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Otto Koenigsberger. Its principles—deep overhangs, breezeways, brise-soleil, light-weight construction, careful orientation—were applied across late-colonial West and East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia in schools, universities, hospitals, and housing. In Africa the legacy is visible at the University of Ibadan, KNUST, Makerere, the University of Zambia, and dozens of secondary schools and ministries. The movement has a double inheritance. On one hand, it produced a genuinely climate-responsive, low-energy architecture before mechanical cooling became widespread, and it trained a generation of African architects. On the other, it was embedded in late-colonial development thinking, often treated local building knowledge as raw material rather than peer, and was largely displaced from the 1970s by air-conditioned international-style construction. Scholars such as Hannah le Roux, Ola Uduku, Iain Jackson, and Łukasz Stanek have recently reassessed the period, while practitioners like Kéré, Adjaye, and Koffi & Diabaté draw selectively on its lessons. With climate change, rising energy costs, and the failure of glass-tower typologies in tropical climates, the contemporary debate is whether—and how—to reclaim tropical architecture as a critical, decolonized practice grounded in passive design, local materials, and African authorship rather than as a colonial export.

Key players

Resources

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

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Country dossier

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Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

AFRAUHN Nairobi 2026

Sep 8–10, 2026Nairobi, KenyaIn-person

Starts in 31 daysRegistration open

Committees & topics

Topics
African Architectural Practices: Vernacular Traditions and Contemporary Production · African Urban Practices: Informality, Self-Build, and Everyday City-Making · African Architectural History: Recovering and Reframing the Built Record · African Urban Planning: Inherited Frameworks and Continental Reform · Regional Identity in Kenyan Architecture · Architectural Education in Africa: Curricula, Accreditation, and Decolonization · Historiographies of African Architecture and Urbanism · Tropical Architecture: Climate, Colonialism, and the Future of Low-Energy Design

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Kenya

As the host nation, KEN offers a rich tapestry of historical urban development, from ancient Swahili city-states to colonial-era planning and post-independence growth.

Role in topic

Egypt

EGY contributes a long and continuous urban history, from ancient civilizations to Islamic and modern architectural developments, offering deep historical perspectives.

Role in topic

Nigeria

NGA represents a diverse range of urban histories, including pre-colonial kingdoms, colonial administrative centers, and rapidly expanding contemporary metropolises.

Role in topic

South Africa

ZAF's urban history is marked by unique challenges and developments, including the impact of apartheid on spatial planning and the subsequent efforts towards urban integration and transformation.

Role in topic