The African Futures Institute (AFI), headquartered in Accra, Ghana, is a new venture that aims to offer a radically different and innovative educational experience to Ghanaian, African and international students, as well as provide an important local and global platform for conversations, exhibitions and publications on architecture and related disciplines. With an average age of 19.8, Africa is the world’s youngest continent, alive with possibility and potential. In this “laboratory of the future,” education plays a crucial and critical role. One of the AFI’s central ambitions is to shift the axis of architectural innovation and influence away from the global North towards the global South, paying homage to the history of the Black Atlantic, a phrase coined by the British sociologist Paul Gilroy, to describe a culture that is simultaneously African and diasporic, a multi-faceted, creatively restless and deeply imaginative identity that holds enormous potential for built environment disciplines globally and locally.
The AFI provides a space that is simultaneously physical, digital and conceptual, underpinned by the desire to provoke and support new scholarship and new opportunities for radical African excellence. It brings together teachers, researchers and practitioners in a wide range of built environment disciplines, including architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, as well as new and innovative disciplinary combinations that are relevant to the African and African diaspora contexts and times. Through academic and practice partnerships globally, it aims to address the pressing need for a new model of education that brings together the arts, humanities and sciences, breaks down artificial and inherited disciplinary boundaries and provides a visionary, ground-breaking experience for the next generation of thinkers, practitioners and activists.
Founded by Lesley Lokko, former founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, in collaboration with Sir David Adjaye OBE, the AFI is supported by three distinguished boards — patrons, trustees and academic advisors.