Kuukuwa Manful, soci-archi
Kuukuwa Manful is an architect and an urban planner. She has an historical approach to studying the contemporary issues in the built environment.
She curates Adansisem, a Ghanean architecture collective and she is also the co-founder of Sociarchi,
a social architecture initiative which is using innovative solutions to solve environmental and social problems.
Could you introduce Accra ?
It’s a colonial city which is built around the Ga ethnic group which had settlements there already. The main settlement is what they call Jamestown now. So forward to when the Europeans started the slave trade and other trades on the shores of the Gold Coast, which is what they called it at the time, Accra grew more and more important because it was at the coast. There was a convenient place for ships to dock which was Jamestown and more and more Europeans started coming there. That's where the Accra High Street, is. It was actually the first major street in the area. The nucleus of the city formed around it. And then, as the city expanded because now it became the administrative capital of the colonial state, people kept moving in and other settlements were absorbed to what was known as Accra.
How would you describe Accra from an urban and architectural point of view?
These remnants of trade (slave, gold, etc), and colonialism can still be seen in the city. For example in Ridge and Cantonments which are in Accra even just up to a few years ago, you would see a lot of bungalow type of houses on about one acre of land. They used to be European settlements and at the time the European houses had have a lot of land and lot of trees like neem trees around them. These standards were not the same for the african homes which would be more close together and in some places even cramped. These are things that still showing how the city is. If you're coming towards the sea, coming from Madina, you can see social distant differences in the layout in the planning of places in the city. And also which places had the better routes at the time, where routes were prioritized to connect certain affluent places together and whereas a lot of these that didn't have so many affluence people did not get this kind of connected services.
How it show nowadays ?
The further you go away from the city center the longer it takes you to get home because you have to go to all this traffic nodes. I always use Madina and Adenta as an example. Before you get from the center of Accra where most of the offices are, most of the big markets, most of the biggest institutions are, before you get in you can spend about 3 hours, some spend 4 hours in traffic just to get home. A lot of the planning, the modern planning was done by men, around men and cars. it assumes everyone has a car, everyone is driving a car, so of course there not lots of planning around safe mass public transport. If you move around accra there are very few bus lanes. Even the ones that are out there are not enforced, everybody drives everywhere that they want. There are even fewer dedicated bicycles lanes, roads markings are not there. This is why I say it’s not just a problem of planning. It’s also a governance and a management problem.
What are the challenges facing Accra ?
What accra needs most is planning and management planning. I don't actually think that much of an extreme overhaul is needed. It's just that a lot of the system just don't exist in the first place. If we think of a waste management system : there's no cit-wide system because it was just never created in the first place for the whole city. At the time where the town council was established there was something for that small town, but it was not expanded as the city continued to grow. And as the city has grown even larger, it got out of hand and nobody followed up. Again, If you look at it, our drainage system, it just wasn't built. So what accra needs is actually for those system to be established in the first place, before to even talk of it or improving them.
How could social architecture help create an inclusive city?
This is thinking about our spaces not only our cities but our spaces all around our country and see how this can work for many people and not just a few people. Just one of the recent things we're looking at, is what's we call "left over spaces" in the city. Examples of these "left over spaces" are where they make an overpass, the space under the overpass. When it’s not over a road, it's usually a patch of land left abandoned or one where nobody really is allowed to use it. We think about and look at what can be done with such places. We also have a collaboration with a local authority in Accra about an open space that, when they came to us they were planning to just make it some shops and it's a space where children play football and gathered. In a situation like this, we understand the commercial interest, but also there is a social interest. So, we work towards designing a solution that has to maintain the social use of the space, while creating avenues for commercial use.
interview by. Senami Juraver
illustration. Bright Ackwerh
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