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Papers by DK Osseo-Asare

Architectural Design, 2021

AA Files, 2019

Journal article. Publisher: AA Publications, The Architectural Association

New Geographies, 2010

POLYCHROMY In Ghana the strategy of telecom companies to gain market share translates to an overw... more POLYCHROMY In Ghana the strategy of telecom companies to gain market share translates to an overwhelming effort to render brands visible by painting logos and brand colors on buildings: swathes of yellow for South African MTN, fuchsia or light green for Kuwaiti Zain (Zain Africa set to be acquired by Indian Bharti) and bright red for British Vodafone, relative to which blue Luxembourgian Tigo and dark green Nigerian Glo are near-invisible! This practice of painting brand colors spilled first from billboards and signage to the array of informal micro-architectures such as sales kiosks and retrofitted containers that line city streets, before spreading to full-scale buildings. Brand colors complement logos to advertise service and signal the availability of a network's recharge cards for purchase at a given location. While critics say that this invasion of branded coloration compromises the image of the city, the color field of corporate branding ultimately blends with the already colorful fabric of the urban environment, as well as with the broader brand ecology.

The product life cycles of electrical appliances and electronic devices impact society and the en... more The product life cycles of electrical appliances and electronic devices impact society and the environment, given the hazardous portion present in their materials flow. Scrapping as an industry serves to decommission end-of-life (EOL) equipment, linking materials processing and recovery activities with recycling, but must be controlled against adverse environmental and human health safety factors. This work tracks an on-going effort—the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP)—to use participatory design methods to upgrade capabilities of the scrap, recycling and maker community located at Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana through co-creation of technology. The authors explain AMP’s aim to reconceptualize Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE or e-waste) as Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE or 3E): not as waste, but as inter-manipulable assemblages of 3E-materials. AMP seeks to employ a hands-on Makers and Development approach (M&D) as a collaborative process to drive interclass innovation by co-designing and fabricating a makerspace, or open community workshop and lab, and networking e-waste and scrap recyclers starting at Agbogbloshie with students and recent graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics or STEAM fields. The investigation at Agbogbloshie over a period of 24 months suggests opportunities for utilizing participatory design to leverage waste management and 3E-materials processing across informal sector recycling ecosystems as inputs for popular prototyping, i.e. peer-to-peer digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing.

Paper presented at the Engineering4Society Conference in Leuven, Belgium on June 18-19, 2015 with recognition from the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology and under the theme "Raising awareness for the societal and environmental role of engineering and (re)training engineers for participatory design": http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7177898/

Conference Presentations by DK Osseo-Asare

Paper presented at and published in proceedings of the 3rd annual Unspoken Borders Conference at ... more Paper presented at and published in proceedings of the 3rd annual Unspoken Borders Conference at PennDesign: Ecologies of Inequality (2009).

Africa is conspicuously absent from the discourse of architecture. Now, thanks to Rem Koolhaas' Lagos, there is mention of Africa's new urban phenomena, an alternate global culture of congestion, emergent entrepreneurship and the informal. This latest attempt to conquer the enduring mystery of the Dark Continent replaces the focus on traditional techniques and materials of construction of previous decades (mud mosques or village housing) and aligns ultimately with the "design can save the world" philosophy of Architecture for
Humanity and NGO-driven social entrepreneurship models.

The problem with this current approach is that glosses over the profound history of modern architecture and planning intervention in Africa. Yes, under contemporary conditions of globalization, Africa
has one of the most phenomenal rates of urbanization in all human history. But architecture is not only now arriving on the scene. African architects trained in the US, the UK, the USSR and later, the new African post-colonies have together with a displaced design community of Western expatriates in Africa already created a large-scale infrastructural network that dictates much of the new urban growth.

Tema, Ghana offers a unique opportunity to measure the social and economic performance of modern architecture and planning in this context, because it is a new city built from scratch over the last fifty years. Other modernist 'New Town' projects, such as Chandigarh in India, Brasilia in Brazil, and Abuja in Nigeria, were designed as new administrative capitals for government. Tema was instead designed to be a modern city of industry, conceived as part of the mid-20th-century Volta River Project (VRP). The VRP was a highly successful and ambitious project to link hydroelectricity from the Akosombo Dam on the Volta River to large-scale industry and an artificial harbor at Tema. Doxiadis Associates designed the original master plan of Tema for a projected population of 250,000 people. That target has now been achieved. Tema has jumpstarted industrialization in Ghana and is now a major industrial and transportation hub for West Africa.

Perhaps the critique of planning most relevant to the Tema case is Hashim Sarkis' essay "The Persistence of Planning," in which he discusses Doxiadis' scalar ekistics in Lebanon. Sarkis notes that while this form of "comprehensive planning" sought to scientifically "accelerate" modernization of the nation-state, partial implementation and a failure to accommodate change limited its success. However, he argues that Doxiadis introduced in Lebanon a descriptive framework (the ekistics philosophy) that championed technocratic government-sponsored development and prioritized datacollection and physical planning. Sarkis calls not for the end of planning, but for an updated approach that interrogates multiplicity to collectively map an inclusive and collective public future that follows Amartya Sen's logic of "reasoned social action." (Sarkis 2003: 205-207).

This reading of Doxiadis' work in Lebanon moves beyond Doxiadis the geopolitical power broker [1] to address the underlying tension of planning in a post-Doxiadis environment. Tema was also designed as part of a national development agenda (and ekistics study). [2] Even more than in the case of Lebanon, foreign actors were involved from inception through implementation: business owners and investors, political advisors and technical experts. Consequently, it is inaccurate to present Tema as a purely national project, especially given the relative weakness of the Ghanaian nation-state compared to partners like Kaiser Aluminum and the U.S. State Department.

Although neocolonialism remains a valid critique of Tema's construction and initial phases of operation, the term is conceptually tied to re-introduction of the European colonialist project through new forms of capitalist imperialism. Such models of global power dynamics are increasingly inadequate in accounting for contemporary globalization, in which new transnational actors and systems of coordination exert indirect control over the nation-state, sub-national and transnational bodies. In order to understand how
design processes in Tema modify both local and global power differentials, the author applies current research in social and network theory to address the agency of architecture and planning.

[1] For discussion of Doxiadis' political prowess see Michelle Provoost, "New Towns on the Cold War Frontier: How modern urban planning was exported as an instrument in the battle for the developing world." URL: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-06-28-provoost-en.html. Also, Markus Daechsel, "Misplaced Ekistics: Constantinos A. Doxiadis and urban plannning in Pakistan." Unpublished paper from Doxiadis
Foundation international workshop (Dec. 2006).

[2] Documentation of Doxiadis Associates' Tema design appear in Ekistics 13: 17, 159-171. For ekistics study of Ghana see "Accra-Tema-Akosombo" in Ekistics 11: 65, 235-276.

Books by DK Osseo-Asare