The call to theorise from the Global South has generated important and creative interventions across the social sciences and humanities. Yet the expansive category of “the South” can obscure uneven geographies of theoretical production. This unevenness is particularly visible in relation to Africa and the built environment. While a rich body of scholarship has emerged that engages African urbanism and infrastructure, there remains a significant lacuna in fields such as urban design theory, planning theory, and architectural theory, where Africa is still rarely centred as a site of theory production.
This panel invites scholarship that takes the African context as a starting point for theorising the built environment across multiple scales: architecture (single buildings or building complexes), infrastructure, neighbourhoods, cities, and regions. The aim is to bring together scholars working with concepts, frameworks, and philosophical reflections that resist the tendency to treat the continent primarily as a site for the application of theory developed elsewhere. Instead, the session explores how engagements with African built environments might generate new conceptual vocabularies and reorient our understanding of the built environment and its place within society.
Interested scholars should kindly send an abstract (approximately 250 words) and a short bio to Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong at eo15@soas.ac.uk by 12th March 2026.
Theorising African Built Environments
