The Pan-African Architecture Biennale (PAAB), launching in Nairobi in 2026, is a groundbreaking event redefining how Africa’s built environment is imagined and discussed. In this interview with the African Innovation Network for The African Cities Magazine, curator Omar Degan, Somali-Italian architect and founder of the Biennale, explains how PAAB rejects Eurocentric notions of “modernity” and architectural value, calling instead for architectural sovereignty by Africans for Africa. Rather than showcasing spectacle, the Biennale will foster debate, collaboration, and radical self-definition across disciplines like architecture, art, urbanism, literature, and policy. Structured around decolonization, democratization, and reconnection, it aims to dismantle inherited hierarchies, revive erased knowledge, and promote education rooted in African contexts. Rotating biennially across African cities and mirrored by an open-access digital archive, PAAB ensures inclusivity and continuity. For Degan, it’s not just an event but an infrastructural and cultural movement—a collective act to reclaim authorship and reimagine African futures on African terms.
In 2026, Nairobi will become the stage for a historic first: the Pan-African Architecture Biennale (PAAB).
It’s not just a new event, it’s a turning point. For the first time, architects, urbanists, designers, academics, artists, writers, and policy thinkers from across the African continent and its diaspora will gather to explore, question, and rewrite the architectural narratives that have too long been defined by others.
But don’t expect sleek models of futuristic towers or polite panel discussions about “development.” This Biennale isn’t selling architectural spectacle. It’s demanding architectural sovereignty. Curated by Somali-Italian architect and educator Omar Degan, the PAAB is being shaped as a radical act of self-definition.
A public space where African voices lead the conversation about African spaces. It’s a break from the legacy of Eurocentric frameworks that have long dictated what counts as “good design,” “progress,” or “modernity” on the continent.
Africa has always been the center of life, of resources, of knowledge. This Biennale is about reclaiming that center. It’s about shifting the architectural discourse from one imposed on Africa to one authored by Africa.
Degan doesn’t mince words. He’s not trying to imitate Venice or align with global design trends. His vision is rooted in the belief that architecture is not neutral, it is cultural, political, and deeply historic. And in a continent of over 1.4 billion people, 54 countries, and thousands of traditions, the idea of a single ‘African architecture’ is both problematic and powerful. The Biennale, in his hands, becomes a platform to deconstruct clichés, surface erased knowledge, and reimagine the future of African cities on Africa’s terms.
This isn’t about chasing global relevance, It’s about recognizing that what’s happening here on this continent is already shaping the future. We just need to stop asking permission to say so.
At the heart of the Pan-African Architecture Biennale is a bold provocation.
Indeed what if everything we’ve been taught about African architecture is wrong? For too long, the architectural identity of the continent has been boxed into two shallow extremes. On one side, there’s the romanticized image of vernacular mud huts, frequently used in travel brochures and academic footnotes, rarely treated as serious architecture. On the other, the glass-and-steel mimicry of Western cities, where so-called “modernity” is measured by height, cost, and how closely a building resembles something seen in Dubai or Shanghai.
There’s this dangerous idea that architecture in Africa doesn’t exist unless it’s a safari lodge or a luxury resort designed by someone from the West. That’s the result of decades of colonial framing and academic neglect.
This false binary has done real damage. It erases the rich diversity of architectural practices on the continent, flattens cultural expression, and undermines local knowledge systems that have evolved over centuries to respond to specific environments, climates, and ways of living. But Degan isn’t advocating a nostalgic return to tradition, nor is he interested in simply adding African flair to Western templates. His call is for a contemporary African architecture that emerges from the continent’s own logic, one that speaks to its ecological conditions, cultural pluralities, and social dynamics.
Architecture is not about style, it’s about relationships to land, to people, to heritage.
He points to the double standard embedded in global design culture. In Europe, the stone-and-wood chalets of the Alps are hailed as iconic examples of regional architecture, proof of cultural continuity and environmental wisdom. But when similar values appear in African architecture, natural materials, passive cooling, climate sensitivity they’re often dismissed as backward or undeveloped.
Why are our vernacular buildings seen as primitive?” They’re no less architectural. They just haven’t been celebrated through the same lens.
Degan believes this lens needs to be shattered and the Biennale aims to do just that. By gathering a wide range of voices and projects from across Africa, it seeks to expand the architectural imagination of the continent and show that African architecture is not a style, but a living, evolving system of knowledge. This is not about aesthetics. It’s about power. It’s about who gets to define what counts as architecture, and who is left out of that definition.
The PAAB is not just an event, it’s a challenge to the architecture world itself. Set to debut in Nairobi in 2026, and designed to roam from city to city across the continent every two years, the Biennale aims to spark nothing short of a continental reckoning. It’s a deliberate move away from static, elitist formats and toward something fluid, collective, and rooted in African realities.
We’re not trying to copy Venice. We’re not interested in replicating Western models. This is something that needs to feel African, function African, and speak African.
At its core, the Biennale is a manifesto for reclaiming authorship, framed around three guiding principles: decolonization, democratization, and reconnection.
The Biennale is a direct response to centuries of colonial and neocolonial control over the architectural narrative of Africa. From the design of public spaces to the curriculum in architecture schools, much of what defines “good architecture” on the continent still comes from outside.
This event is about taking back the pen about giving African architects, academics, communities, and creatives the space to define, critique, and project their own visions of the built environment. The Biennale seeks to dismantle inherited hierarchies of value, style, and legitimacy.
I want real conversations. Hard conversations. Like, why are local architects left out of humanitarian projects? Why does African architecture only get recognition when it’s filtered through a Western lens?
The physical event in Nairobi will feature exhibitions showcasing both built and speculative projects, documentation of vernacular practices, and design research rooted in African contexts. But this isn’t just about presentation, it’s about dialogue. Instead of the usual polished panel discussions, the Biennale will host open debates where friction is welcomed and difficult questions are confronted head-on.
Workshops will engage not only professionals but also students and families, making space for intergenerational exchange and grassroots participation. Across the city, installations and pop-up events will decentralize the experience, taking the Biennale out of formal institutions and into public spaces.
It welcomes not just architects, but sociologists, anthropologists, planners, artists, historians, community activists, writers, and even sci-fi authors. Because building the future of African cities isn’t just a technical task, it’s a cultural, social, and political one.
I want to hear from sci-fi writers. They’re imagining futures. And architects need to be in conversation with that. With dreamers, storytellers, and community builders.
Workshops will engage families, students, and citizens not just professionals. Discussions will be multilingual, and spaces will be physically and digitally decentralized. It’s a vision of architecture as something collaborative, public, and alive.
I don’t care about cute exhibitions where people take selfies at the vernissage. I want debates. I want friction. I want uncomfortable questions.
Most global architecture events cater to the few elite institutions, jet-setting practitioners, and media-friendly “starchitects.” The PAAB is designed to do the opposite. The Biennale is preparing a fully digitized, open-access version that mirrors its physical counterpart. Every exhibition, talk, and research project will be documented, archived, and made freely available online.
The reality is 90% of the people who would benefit from this Biennale won’t be able to travel to Nairobi. So we’re bringing the Biennale to them. That’s not a compromise. That’s the point.
This is not an afterthought or a supplement, it’s a core component of the Biennale’s vision. The digital platform is being designed as a long-term knowledge infrastructure, a living archive that grows with each edition and remains accessible to anyone, anywhere. For students in Kisangani, researchers in Accra, or architects in the diaspora, the Biennale will be just a few clicks away. The goal is to redistribute access to architectural discourse, to break the cycle where African architects must go through Western publications or institutions to gain visibility on their own continent.
The structure of the Biennale also reflects its pan-African ambition. After its inaugural edition in Nairobi, the Biennale will rotate every two years, landing in a different African city each time. This mobility is more than symbolic. Each host city will shape the identity, themes, and content of its edition, ensuring that the Biennale remains rooted in local realities and reflective of the continent’s vast diversity. What it looks like in Dakar will not be what it looks like in Addis Ababa, and that’s the point.
One of the most urgent battles the Pan-African Architecture Biennale hopes to ignite is not about buildings, it’s about education. For Degan, the crisis in African architecture starts in the classroom, where outdated syllabi continue to shape how the next generation of architects think, design, and imagine.
We’re still teaching Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe like they’re gods. But how many students know about Demas Nwoko, Hassan Fathy, or even someone like Laurie Baker, who worked in India for decades ?
This is not a call to erase Western architectural history, but a demand for relevance and balance. Why are African architecture students still learning about 20th-century European masters in isolation without grounding in their own contexts, their own histories, their own climates and communities?
The result, Degan warns, is a profession that continues to design for ideals imported from elsewhere, instead of from the ground up.
But he’s quick to point out that fixing this is not as simple as swapping out a few textbooks. The deeper issue is a systemic absence of African documentation. Generations of African architects have worked often under challenging conditions, but left little behind in the way of drawings, essays, case studies, or critical reflections. Without archives, without records, without publications, the knowledge vanishes.
If practitioners don’t write, if they don’t publish, then the next generation has nothing to learn from. We need to build a culture of documentation, archiving, and knowledge-sharing. Otherwise, we’re just repeating the same mistakes in silence.
The Biennale, then, is not just an event or a showcase, it’s a call to action for a more self-reflective, self-sustaining architectural culture.
Through its digital archive, its cross-generational dialogue, and its continent-wide network of contributors, it hopes to create a new reference library for African architectural education, one written from within.
For Degan, the Biennale is also a political intervention, a way to build momentum behind local agency and push back against a top-down, imported vision of urban development. He believes African architects should have a stronger voice not just in the profession, but in policymaking, planning, and governance.
We need to stop asking for a seat at the table. We need to build the table ourselves, and make it strong enough that no one can ignore it.
The most radical ambition behind the Pan-African Architecture Biennale may not lie in what it presents, but in how it exists. From the start, Omar Degan has been clear: this is not another iteration of Venice in warmer weather, nor a tribute act to Chicago or Lisbon. It’s not about adapting a Euro-American model to African soil, it’s about a strory rooted in African realities, complexities, and contradictions.
This has never been done before. That’s why it’s hard. But if we don’t create an African model for architectural discourse now, then when?
What Degan and his team are attempting is not just a cultural event it’s an infrastructural shift. One that questions the frameworks of prestige, the flows of funding, the language of validation. One that builds its own platforms, its own archive, its own vocabulary. And crucially, one that does not wait for approval.
Each one of us has a role to play. Students, practitioners. the moms bringing their kids to see what the future could be. This is not a passive event, this is a collective act.
Participation doesn’t require a plane ticket. If you can’t be in Nairobi, the Biennale will meet you where you are digitally, openly, in your language and on your terms. Through its digital platform, open access archive, and decentralized philosophy, the PAAB is actively dismantling the idea that meaningful architectural discourse only happens in the room where power gathers.
What’s being launched in 2026 is not a culmination, it’s a beginning. A beginning of new networks, new pedagogies, new alliances across borders and disciplines. A beginning that insists African cities are not blank slates for imported visions, but living systems of memory, struggle, creativity, and resilience.
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