Sense City Africa: exploring African cities with smartphone photos
CEAT under the direction of Dr. Jérôme Chenal, urban architect, MER EPFL, and head of EXAF, is involving EPFL in the Seoul Architecture Biennial of this 2021 edition. "Sense City Africa" is the name of the project, which consists of offering the world a real and current image of Africa through photos captured by smartphones and published on a collaborative platform.
The theme of this year's Architecture Biennial in Seoul from September 16 to October 31, 2021, is "CROSSROADS, Building the Resilient City". Bringing together 5 continents, more than 100 participating cities, and several renowned architects, urban planners, and designers, SBAU is in its 3rd edition. All participants share the objective of this edition of the SBAU, which is to show how cities around the world are mobilizing in their respective contexts to make architectures and built environments more and more resilient.
Dr. Jérôme Chenal as one of the curatorial architects at this Biennial has realized with his team a physical booth and a web platform to participate in SBAU 21. You may wonder how it is possible to show the resilience of the cities of the South through a digital platform?
Indeed, as surprising as it may be, the African continent has been experiencing in recent years a meteoric evolution of digital tools, including cell phones and all related tools. Thus, smartphones and online messaging applications are part of the daily life of most Africans nowadays.
Moreover, the various researches and analyses of Dr. Jérôme Chenal on the urban experience in Africa constantly highlight that there are "planning intelligence" invented and used in Africa, one of the continents which, according to the collective imagination, should be the one to face the most resilience conditions.
Finally, it is noted that these techniques are little or poorly known to the rest of the world. Sense City Africa is the opportunity for Africans themselves and for all, to present the particular resilience and the true image of the cities of Africa, in an instantaneous, faithful, and authentic way from simple photos taken with smartphones. The booth built in Seoul allows, during the Biennial, to physically represent the participation of the EPFL team led by Dr. Jérôme Chenal, and to project the images collected by the sensecityafrica.io platform, which in turn, allows extending the project beyond the ephemera.
Inhabitants and visitors of African cities, all your contributions are expected on https://sensecity-africa.io/ with your photos and descriptions of the different facades of African cities, whatever they are. The objective is, as the theme of this 3rd edition of the SBAU indicates, to participate in the crossroads of all types of urban resilience in the world.
Additional links: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/sensecity-a-collaborative-project-presented-at-seo/