CANCELLED: Workshop: 'From the City of Plans'

*** Please note that this workshop has been cancelled ***

The workshop is led by Ruth-Anne NAS Richardson, a practising Ghanaian architect, writer and principal of StudioRED in Accra. She is a member of the African Futures Institute (AFI) research team, appointed in 2022 as AFI Research Team Lead. She was an invited panelist at the 2023 London Science Museum's pre-COP28 event, "Towards Nature Positive, Smart Net Zero Cities" and invited speaker at the 3rd Ghana Green Building Summit in July 2020. Her studio explores new and neglected ways of designing / shaping community, dignity and inclusivity in urban-rural Ghanaian landscapes, while focusing research on water urbanisms in Ghana. She has co-led archival research projects and served as reviewer for architecture design studios at both KNUST (Kumasi) and CU (Miotso). She is a proponent for the local restructuring of architectural pedagogy towards a focus on creative agency, reimagined design frameworks and sustainable building technologies for Ghana. Richardson was awarded the Republic of Ghana Presidential Honour of Distinguished Service in March 2023 for her role in the design and construction of Ghana's first Infectious Diseases Center (GIDC) in Accra. She is an Azrieli Visiting Critic for Carleton University's Winter 2024 Graduate Option Studio and Academic Critic for AFI's 2024 Nomadic African Studio and currently working on select institutional building projects in Ghana.

This workshop will follow from an open public conversation on the same theme — 'From the City of Plans' — that explores the historical and present models of technical cooperation and research collaboration to understand their implications on 'pedagogy and curricula', spatial development [in Ghanaian metropolises of Greater Accra and Kumasi], resource use / management and local empowerment, and to address identifiable imbalances in these models. Ruth-Anne Richardson would connect the following outcomes and reference works: 

• re-shaping cultures of architecture knowledge production and transference across global divides
• comparing competing and evolving ideas of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) campus design in connection with issues of land, water management, building technologies, climate, program and community relationships since the 1940s [project reference: Neither an Island nor a Hole]
• mapping resistant forms of spatial logic and arrangement [project reference: the Makola Market transcripts]

This event is part of the Global Engagement Fund 'Repairing historical collaborations between KNUST and UCL in the DPU’s 70th anniversary' that has been put forward in collaboration with the Bartlett's Development Planning Unit (DPU), UCL History of Art, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the Architectural Association, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Image caption: KNUST campus from the 1960s, courtesy KNUST Development Office.