STRUCTURAL CHANGE
Berlin Questions: AFRICA AS THE LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE TEXT
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Debra Hurford Brown
Roger Kellerman Berlin Questions is an annual, multi-day conference and a platform for transdisciplinary dialogue providing ideas for structural change and collective action. Since 2017, the conference has made Berlin home for debate, inviting politicians, journalists and artists from all over the world to address topics of global importance. This year’s edition of the conference, Metropolis: The New Now, is dedicated to local solutions to global challenges, with a particular focus on the future of the city after the Covid-19 pandemic. Hosted by Governing Mayor of Berlin Michael Müller, the conference took place in a hybrid format for the first time: both in person at various locations in Berlin and online, via livestream or in a 3D virtual environment. We were lucky to have the possibility to listen to Lesley Lokko. Lesley Lokko was born in 1964 in Scotland. She grew up in Ghana, and studied in the US and UK. She is an architect, academic, and bestselling novelist. She was previously the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. She did step down as dean of The Bernard & Anne
Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, in January 2021. Lesley Lokko is currently setting up an independent architecture school in Accra, Ghana, the African Futures Institute. She received her first architecture degree at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and earned her doctorate in architecture from the University of London in 2007. Whilst still a student, Lesley Lokko began an edited anthology, that has come to define her interest across her academic career and her fiction writing, about ‘race’ and its relationship to the built environment. However, that initial interest has expanded considerably to encompass a broader interest in identifying politics, culture and urbanism. White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture was published in 2000, six years after its inception. It remains one of the few anthologies explicitly dedicated to the study of ‘race’ as a meaningful category of enquiry within the architecture canon. Lesley Lokko wrote fiction fulltime for thirteen years, publishing eleven best-selling novels but continued to keep a peripheral interest and
foot in architectural discourse. Her newest book, Soul Sisters, was published in the summer of 2021. “A decade is often a good yardstick for measuring the impact of events. In my mind, the global Covid pandemic and the global racial justice protests are fused, even though each started as a local phenomenon before spreading like wildfire. “Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with an average age of 19, compared with 38 in Europe. Scientists have different explanations for why the death rate in Africa was so low compared to so many other places, youthfulness; heat; a largely outdoors lifestyle, there doesn’t appear to be a single, concrete answer,” says Lesley Lokko. “However, the prolonged lockdown and reliance on digital media to interface with the rest of the world left an unexpected consequence in its wake: Africa’s youth emerged in 2021 with a stronger and more confident sense of self, partly in response to the protests, which provided first-hand evidence that ‘there’ (for example, Europe and the United States) was not quite the Promised Land that many believe it to be, and a new sense of interconnectedness across the 2021 No. 28 MEETINGS INTERNATIONAL | 51