Research Impressions from Africa, a Fifth-Year Student at the Faculty of Architecture
Sara Stojkanović, a fifth-year student at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Montenegro, is staying in Africa, where she is conducting research as part of the master's final exam. On this occasion, she conveyed to us part of the research impressions from the African continent.
In vernacular architecture in development and transition such as that on the border of Kenya and Tanzania, the architect is in a unique position to revive the faith of one tribe in its vanishing culture.
The first question was whether we could immerse ourselves in the generational experience of the indigenous nomadic Masai tribe who migrated from South Sudan to understand all the slow modifications caused by climate and the natural environment over the centuries, before the inevitable step into new spatial experiences. The architect, here, needs to go back to the beginning and let the new building grow out of the people who will live in it.
The results of months of field research in the Kilimanjaro region of East Africa offer an alternative context and approach to the disappearing architectural tradition of the indigenous Masaai tribe. Intensive research is being conducted as part of providing a design response to the planned exodus of such a population from Ngorongoro Crater, a protected volcanic region, to Tang, a city on the coast of Tanzania.
As a continent that has been rapidly urbanizing over the past three decades, Africa has gained a role in the global economy. The growth trend will continue thanks to the macroeconomic climate on the continent and microeconomic reforms in countries such as Tanzania. The extensive planning process for the Kilimanjaro region illustrates goals and integration through physical development, including architectural heritage. From here, references and the inclusion of the preservation of that heritage in the planning priorities of postcolonial, post-conflict and developing cities that aim to function as global are examined.
Informal, indigenous settlements developed originally around the edges of the Kilimanjaro nature reserves and volcanic areas, and have since gradually migrated and moved away. The gap between the way of life then and now, although at first glance imperceptible, requires the hybridity of today's urban life and its need to expand, with spaces that are in line with the cultural norms of the indigenous population. Increasingly, efforts are being made to introduce spatial innovation in an area that is highly sensitive to today's state and cultural aspirations, which calls into question the readiness to step into new spatial experiences of one of the oldest African communities living in recognizable conditions and units.Masai communities exist in the context of a landscape that has clearly defined boundary conditions. The requirements and limitations of such a clear demarcation (cultural, state and natural) require respect and, if transformation is approached, the existence of interaction with the built. Taking into account and observing the existing tribal bombs and the landscape itself, it offers generators for the final design response that includes natural and built. Interaction and life with the oldest tribes of African soil, change of clans and cultures on the site, through the adopted methodology provide the first insight into the refusal of cooperation in rural relocation, supported by the Tanzanian government and organizations for the protection of heritage and biodiversity as consent to the new and impossibility of verbalizing modern needs and architectural ideas. However, if one can see through the random arrangement of booms and intuitively built elements of their traditional home, the lines on such communicate an instructive lesson in architecture, through a specifically developed architectural dialect of the community. Attitude towards chosen issue is based on a critical assessment of the existing policy of (non) preservation of Masai sites in terms of time, sites and architecture, which emphasizes the fact that the Kilimanjaro region needs multiple approaches through tradition preservation, which should respect several initial intervene norms set by results of a research as the second of three phases of master thesis.