Africaland! argues that climate instability dominates everything, exposing illusions of architectural permanence amid climate destabilization, asking: What constitutes a charged disciplinary response? Africaland! claims architecture as uniquely equipped to originate theoretical-aesthetic frameworks to navigate complex global challenges; however, new qualities, arising outside architecture, need theorizing, requiring knowledge hybridity. Africa is the arena - on the bleeding-edge of climate urgency, yet least resourced to counter coming disruptions. Africaland! probes impact-effects of Africa’s (post-post) modernity, identifying site-specific conditions—both built and unbuilt—mutating under racialized global-capitalist production, shaping contemporary Africa in all their untheorized difference. Africaland! targets the Great Green Wall, an AU anti-desertification initiative spanning from Atlantic to Red Sea: an ecotone defying conventional definitions—not object, landscape, political, nor national; resource-rich, yet impoverished; scaling from sand grain to continental expanse. It unfurls perception, unfolding in sublime contradiction. Unbounded by geography or borders, yet recording immense shifts in politics, economics, culture, and land, it registers as an intense site of difference—a surface of massive change—a vast utopian endeavor representing an untheorized African phenomenon. Africaland! chronicles the drivers of Sahelian transformation under climate turn, revealing complex system-agents, positioning Africa as a transformative locus of nuanced multiplicities in climate knowledge production, while expanding architecture’s global relevance and disciplinary scope.

Anna Nnenna Abengowe is an architect, educator, and spatial practitioner. She is a senior lecturer at Birmingham City University and a visiting fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2025), an academic advisor at African Futures Institute (2024), and a contributing advisor at matri-archi (2024). She is the founder and principal of The Agency: [spatial agency africa, 2024]. She was the deputy director and academic lead, and Unit 22 colead at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (2022–23). She is coawardee of a Graham Foundation grant (2022), a cocreator of her(e), otherwise digital platform (2021), and cofounder of saay|yaas design collective (2020). She actively develops new, transnationally relevant platforms in experimental and speculative pedagogy, research, and practice for architecture, urban, and other spatial practices across Africa.