The winning design for the Africatown International Design Ideas Competition presents a solution to honor the history of the community in Mobile, Alabama—created in 1860 by former slaves brought on the last known slave ship to the U.S.—and promises to revitalize it.
The historically significant community of Africatown stands in a low-lying area 4.8 km (3 mi) north of Mobile, where 110 enslaved people were illegally detained from a 26-m (86-ft) ship, Clotilda. By 1865, when slavery was abolished in the country, members of that community founded Africatown.
The location stands as the only settlement of the era built by Africans in America. In the following decades, Africatown grew to about 10,000 citizens in more than 2,000 homes, with local schools, businesses, and houses of worship. Industrial development encroached on the waterfront around Africatown in the mid-20th century and suffered further in the face of Jim Crow-era policies that deprived residents of key resources. Today, Africatown has about 2,000 residents living amid significant vacant and blighted properties.
A team of African and Caribbean diaspora designers and the women-owned firm, WXY architecture + urban design, won the Africatown International Design Ideas Competition. Inspired by the May 2019 discovery of the sunken slave ship Clotilda in the Mobile River
Delta, the competition challenged multidisciplinary design teams to “imagine a revived Africatown, with 16 land and water-edged venues on four sites across three cities that interpret and honor its history.”
Encouraging architectural concepts using African design principles, creative placemaking, and worldclass destination planning, the competition engaged a jury of eight local leaders and eight design professionals, headed by noted architect, author and educator, Jack Travis FAIA, NOMAC. The jury also includes Africatown leaders, Clotilda descendants, and community advocates who reviewed the designs and essays submitted.
The Africatown International Design Idea Competition drew 118 teams from around the world. At least 24 teams submitted final design boards for review by the jury, as well as more than 150 pages of essays detailing their design research.
The theme of the winning team’s process, Blood Memory, alludes to Africatown’s “ancestral connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings,” as described in the seven fires prophecy of the Anishinaabe Nation. The expression describes the good feelings people have when they are near those things and how “knowledge or memory from the blood is the elemental aspect of being.”
To translate this into design, the team focused on several key principles, including an understanding of the community and its environment, its use of local materials and techniques to preserve vernacular architecture, the adaptation to the hot and humid climate, and their respect for the town’s spiritual and cultural heritage. The architects and designers also emphasized the importance of community engagement, the town’s significance to the American story, and the promotion of sustainability through environmentally conscious design.
Working to energize and celebrate the extensive site, the team assembled by WXY architecture + urban design includes design-build firm Total Consult and architects Brandt:Haferd and Body Lawson Associates, as well as landscape architect Elizabeth J. Kennedy ASLA.
The group joined forces to conceive a composition of new urban interventions that also knits the community fabric. Accessed through an honorary entry point, the Ancestral Gateway, visitors, and residents are welcomed into a circular entry plaza that opens toward Africatown Boulevard, embracing and drawing in the flow of pedestrian traffic.
The new public spaces, rammed-earth architecture, gathering pavilions, and commemorative elements work to preserve local building traditions while integrating the city’s street patterns and accommodating new uses for the hot, humid climate.
A new memorial garden includes a Palaver Pavilion, named after the traditional African gathering place in the shade of the palaver tree, and across a nearby reflecting pond is a new Wall of Generations to hold busts honoring Cudjo Lewis, Prichard Mayor John Smith, Emperor Green, and Zora Neale Hurston; they are the “four chosen descendants who captured the zeitgeist of each generation of Africatown,” which extends from 1861 to 1960.
“With our proposed training school complex and four housing prototypes, these new gestures of remembrance and celebration are matched by a wide-ranging vision of Africatown’s future, as a generator of ideas, talents, and opportunities that carry these traditions forward and adapt them for the greatest good,” says Farida Abu-Bakare FRAIC, an architect with WXY architecture + urban design, who led the competition team.
“Our team researched the community and its history to ensure that the design accurately reflected the deep cultural ties to Africa,” adds WXY founding principal, Claire Weisz, FAIA, “Community research was a crucial part of the process which allowed us to respond to local needs and values.”
