New essay: Global Trajectories of Polish Architects in the Cold War
In: Anti-Atlas. Critical Area Studies from the East of the West, edited by Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell, and Michał Murawski (London: UCL Press, 2025), 301-7
My contribution to the Anti-Atlas is an annotated diagram mapping the trajectories of 417 architects and planners from socialist Poland who worked in Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War. Focusing on the top 12 recipient countries in terms of project volume, this diagram is based on information from professional dossiers submitted to the SARP (Society of Polish Architects) in Warsaw. Data from these individual dossiers was transcribed and analyzed using social network analysis software. More than just a representation of existing knowledge, the resulting diagram becomes a generator of new insights. For example, it identifies the largest recipient countries of architectural labor from the People’s Republic of Poland (Libya, Algeria, Syria, and Iraq), illustrates patterns and volumes of mobility of Polish architects, and highlights individuals with unique career trajectories, which can be further explored by examining their dossiers. By consolidating individual trajectories into a single, comprehensive map, it presents a geography of architectural exchanges from the 1950s to the 1980s that goes beyond Cold War narratives of a world divided into two blocs. In so doing it offers a more multilateral and antagonistic understanding of global urbanization and its architecture.
February 28, 2025
Workshop: Land, Deed, and Debt: University Campuses in West Africa
Workshop on March 27, 2025 at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, organized by Kuukuwa Manful and Łukasz Stanek
The Land, Deed, and Debt workshop examines the consequences of the “ceding,” “gifting,” and “granting” of land by Indigenous communities for the establishment and expansion of higher education institutions in colonial and post-independence West Africa. Participants study how these often-forced land transfers have shaped the design, construction, and use of space on and around campuses, as well as the socio-spatial relationships between communities and universities. Organized by Łukasz Stanek and Kuukuwa Manful, the workshop fosters an international comparative perspective on the histories of land transferred by Indigenous peoples to educational institutions.
March 4, 2025
New paper: Hegemony by Adaptation. Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry
Comparative Studies in Society and History (2024), 1-34
This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War
October 8, 2024
New paper: Race, Time, Architecture. Dilemmas of Africanization in Ghana, 1951-1966
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83:2 (2024), 191-208
This article discusses the Africanization of architectural labor in Ghana during the late colonial and early postindependence periods (1951–66). It focuses on the state-supported emergence, advancement, and emancipation of Indigenous architects and institutions in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. Using archival materials held in Accra, Kumasi, and London, the article shows how professionals and administrators negotiated between their double obligations: to fast-track governmental development plans and to Africanize the Public Works Department and its successors. These decision makers addressed temporal dilemmas concerning recruitment, standards, allocation, and racialization of architectural labor. In so doing, they redefined both colonial-era racial categories and racialized Cold War imaginaries of who counted as an African and who counted as an Other. This study advances the architectural history of postcolonial Ghana and broadens the debate about racialization of architecture beyond North America and Western Europe.
September 10, 2024