Constructing transport architecture in West Africa. A multi-scalar history of materialities, territories and builders

• Applicant: Dr. Monika Motylinska
• Subject Area: Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511557347

transport architecture, mainly from the 1950s to 1980s, in order to investigate how imaginaries of infrastructural projects were turned into transport architecture, i.e., how transport architecture actually materialised in West Africa across scales, from the local and site specific to the territorial, and who had agency in this. With the intention to complicate the notions of both historical and current "disconnections" and "ruination", we are going focus on the south-western, supposedly least accessible part of the larger region (specifically: Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire). This central question about materialisation of transport architecture opens up a multi-scalar investigation of construction materials and technologies, but also of actors and networks involved in the planning, as well as of implementation and maintenance of these projects across various kinds of boundaries, colonial, imperial, national but also linguistic. We opt to focus on a wide array of structures considering built (and unbuilt) roads, bridges, ports, airports and railway lines as complex works of architecture and engineering. Through an extensive multi-scalar mapping of projects we expect to unveil genealogies, modalities of actual construction and legacies of both spectacular structures such as the Felix Houphouët-Boigny Bridge in Abidjan and more mundane projects such as secondary laterite roads in Bong County, Liberia, and related artefacts and buildings, from gas stations and repair workshops, to accommodation for construction workers as well as travellers along these transport arteries, and to all kinds of commercial establishments. Analysing such long trajectories, including the manifold afterlives of these projects, involves not only extensive documentation via, among others, archival research, but also a critical engagement with the tangible and intangible heritage of transport architecture, by asking whose legacies we are looking at. This research project thus not only aims to achieve a better understanding of the technical aspects of road, railway, waterway and airport construction and their intersections, it also seeks to address and historicise a variety of ecological, political, cultural and societal issues through the prism of the materiality of transport architecture. From the disciplinary point of view, our aim is to broaden architectural history by including understudied and overlooked typologies, actors and regions, while working with both common and more innovative methods of the investigation of the built environment. Our proposed approach is pursued in dialogue with transport history, science and technology studies or anthropology of infrastructure, while drawing extensively on a methodological framework informed by various ways of mapping across scales and brings together scholars from the “North” and the “South”.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Belgium, Côte d´Ivoire
• Partner Organisation: Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen ; Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Timpoko-Helène Kienon-Kabore; Professor Dr.-Ing. Johan Lagae