For a while now I’ve been wanting to post some of the images by celebrated architect David Adjaye‘s to “… photograph and document key cities in Africa as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism.”  It is also part of Adjaye’s “… personal quest … to address the scant knowledge of the built environment of the African continent.” The pictures were displayed at London’s Design Museum till earlier this month as a series of large projections against a backdrop of African beats composed by Adjaye’s brother for the exhibit. David Adjaye visited 46 cities and took 36,000 pictures. Only 3,000 pictures were displayed in the gallery. Some of it gives the impression of holiday snapshots, while others have more to them, like the one above taken in downtown Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, a city once referred to as the “Paris of West Africa.”  Here‘s a link to a mainstream review. Anybody went to see it? Would love to hear your reactions of seeing the photographs in the exhibition. The pics here are only a small sample.

(BTW, Adjaye has been commissioned to design the new Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture planned on the Mall in Washington D.C.).

Asmara, Eritrea

Cairo, Egypt

Gaborone, Botswana

Dakar, Senegal

Nouakchott, Mauritania

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Trump tariffs and US Imperialism

Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.