PURPOSE

Africa currently has the fastest urbanisation rates of any continent (1). As urbanisation increases African cities are becoming refugia for many wildlife populations, including threatened species (2). Even in industrialised nations such as South Africa wildlife populations are reappearing naturally across cities (3). The climate crisis, rapid urban growth and ecosystem collapse will force African people and their iconic wildlife to live in ever closer proximity. This will create spaces of conflict and fear that architects will have an opportunity to sensitively mediate using their unique skill set in designing space that nurtures and nourishes life.

African wildlife conservation was one of the tools used by colonialism to displace African people from their land to create a European idea of uninhabited, protected “wilderness” (4). The dislocation of land from African people meant many scaled cultural and spiritual practises involving the sanctity of land, its sustainable use, relational links to specific species of wildlife and plants have lost relevance. Yet many African cultural systems historically helped protect wildlife, shown in the evidence of Africa possessing more large mammal species than any other continent (5). Anthropogenic extinctions of megafaunal wildlife happened to a lesser or greater degree across all continents, except for Africa, through the latter stages of the Pleistocene epoch (which ended 11 700 BC). Africa’s pre-colonial exceptionalism in megafaunal wildlife conservation has been credited to the naivety of prey to human arrival after leaving Africa, advanced weaponry and cooperative hunting techniques (6). However there remains a lack of academic understanding in how African precolonial cultural systems could have led to the protection of its megafaunal wildlife diversity.

As these cultural systems are documented and critically engaged African cities provide a site for their architectural implementation. African cities provide one of the best opportunities for the application of urban rewilding in the world due to their young age and access to a full suite of megafaunal wildlife species for reintroduction. African cities could provide us with a future where wildlife and people live as part of an integrated system protected by a renewed cultural identity, one where global leadership in environmental sustainability is on display for all the world to learn from.

We as Africans are not poor but rich. In terms of how to live sustainably within richly diverse ecological systems we have much to teach the rest of the world. At MSSA our purpose is to showcase this learning through architectural, landscape and technological innovation in the built environment. 21^st century wildlife conservation needs to be relevant to both city and rural ecosystems, but in extremely modified habitats like cities projects need careful design and ongoing management if they are to deliver on ecosystem services (7). Through our built and research work we at MSSA aim to lead what this looks like in the future city.