The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is embarking on a new initiative aimed at understanding "architecture's historical role in decolonization, neocolonialism, globalization, and their manifestations" across the African continent, according to a recent announcement. 

The focus on Africa's architecture represents a desire on the part of CCA to expand scholarly research efforts by reconsidering its archives in order to "challenge the reliance on Western sources by looking beyond institutional archives to others constructed around single buildings, international organizations, urban spaces, new policies, statistics, laws, photography, financial programs, and philosophical, intellectual, or cultural propositions."

Starting in October 2019, CCA will host an 18-month research effort in collaboration with 10 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation researchers to undertake this challenge. The scholars will develop projects that "seek to analyze and historicize the ways in which architecture manifests transformations in post-independence African countries," according to the CCA's website.  

The research endeavor is aimed at exploring several of the under-reported facets of the intense and contested urbanization that has taken place across the continent over the last century. For example, Doreen Adengo, principal at Adengo Architecture, will work to document the modernist architecture of Kampala, Uganda, and its post-occupancy adaptations from the perspective of the local user, according to CCA. 

While Dele Adeyemo, a doctoral student at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, will consider the Modernist new town and harbor at Tema, Ghana as a case study to research "how the emergence of logistics, as a networked spatial system, has governed urbanization in Africa," according to CCA's announcement. 

In addition, Huda Tayob, senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, will examine the "event-architecture" of a series of pan-African conferences that took place between 1953 and 1974.

For a complete list of the research topics, see the CCA website.