Building African Futures presents ten essays by young architects, urban planners and activists that offer innovative solutions to big challenges, including housing shortages, informality, legal roadblocks and misunderstandings between architects, policy-makers and local people. Their ideas are grounded yet transformative. They reflect the authors’ direct experiences across a range of African cities, but the issues they speak to resonate across the continent. This collection is a rich resource for urban activists, built environment professionals, local governments and a general audience with an interest in African urbanism.

The manifestoes were presented in September 2022 during a symposium in Accra titled “Reimagining African Futures through Transformative Urbanism and Architecture”, organised by the African State Architecture (ASA) project, SOAS, University of London; the African Futures Institute (AFI) and the Institute for African Studies (IAS), University of Ghana.