Constructing transport architecture in West Africa. A multi-scalar history of materialities, territories and actors (CTRAAF)

Date
January 2023 to December 2025
Category
Members
Keywords
transport architecture
West Africa
materialities
Research fields
Arts and Architecture
Cultural Sciences
History and Archaeology
Technology and Engineering

The proposed project follows genealogies, materialisations and legacies of various forms of transport architecture, mainly from the 1950s to 1980s, in order to investigate how imaginaries of infrastructural projects were turned into transport architecture, i.e., how transport architecture actually materialised in West Africa across scales, from the local and site specific to the territorial, and who had agency in this. With the intention to complicate the notions of both historical and current "disconnections" and "ruination", we are going focus on the western, supposedly least accessible part of the larger region (Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire). This central question about materialisation of transport architecture opens up a multi-scalar investigation of construction materials and technologies, actors and networks involved in the planning, as well as of implementation and maintenance of these projects. From the disciplinary point of view, our aim is to broaden architectural history by including understudied and overlooked typologies, actors and regions, while working with both common and more innovative methods of the investigation of the built environment. Our proposed approach is pursued in dialogue with transport history, science and technology studies and anthropology of infrastructure, while drawing extensively on a methodological framework informed by various ways of mapping across scales and brings together scholars from the “North” and the “South”.