The 2017 CCA Master’s Students Program was on the topic of development and aid in Africa. Never have there been as many opportunities for architecture students and young architects to research and design the built environment of Africa as there are today. New institutions, satellite campuses, travel studios, and humanitarian programs have proliferated in recent years, often citing the astonishing urban population growth forecasted on the continent for the twenty-first century. But what about the twentieth century? How might studying past design interventions carried out in in the name of research, aid, or development allow us to develop a more critical and informed perspective on current initiatives and their visions of the future of Africa, and of the Global South more broadly?

Following this line of inquiry, participants of the Master’s Students Program used archives and libraries recently acquired by the CCA to examine how models of expertise and contexts of exchange have transformed in different post-Independence African countries between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Gareth Hammond
University of Toronto, Canada

Philippe Génois-Lefrançois
Université de Montréal, Canada