In this conversation, Sandhya Naidu Janardhan and Dele Adeyemo — both recipients of the OBEL Teaching Fellowship — discuss their work in social impact design and critical urban theory, expanding on community-based research in Mumbai and Lagos respectively. Both touch on the potential for collaboration through festivals and community initiatives to foster social transformation.

This interview is part of a series of ten conversations exploring OBEL and its initiatives, including the Award, Fellowships and Travel Grants.

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI/KOOZThanks both for joining me. Sandhya, can I start by asking you to share your story and how you got into your line of research?

SANDHYA NAIDU JANARDHANYes, thank you for the question. Sharing my journey from when I graduated from my masters’ programme in 2008 — it was at the peak of the housing crisis, and then that snowballed in the rest of the world. I found myself working with a design nonprofit based out of San Francisco, which opened up this whole world of designing for and with communities. Growing up with my background, from a fairly conservative, middle class South Indian family, I've always wondered about the design briefs that we're given in university: we were asked to design art galleries and museums and all these institutional buildings. Our reference points would be European architects, because twenty years ago, our own galleries and museums were very dilapidated and really not used at all — anyway, my family never took me or my siblings to any of those cultural institutions. So the reference points were very international, but I always questioned the design brief: to whom are we catering?

I think that has carried over in my practice — in addition to my own personal experience of moving home very frequently within the same city, due to the financial constraints that we had as a family. A combination of all of that has sustained me in what one could call a social impact design practice. I took a trip around the globe and found myself back in Mumbai — and this is where we, along with the community, started what we call a Community Design Agency. I say “along with the community”, because the genesis of the organisation happened after I met the various communities we're working with right now. Our organisation became more of a vehicle to bring resources into the community, as opposed to imposing some grand vision as an ‘entrepreneur’. We are a small group of architects, artists, engineers and sociologists and urban planners.  We are a team of 26, of which seventeen women are from the community we’re working with right now. The community forms a major part of our work force, if you will.

KOOZThat’s quite the ambition and work that you're undertaking. Dele, could you kindly share a bit about the research that you've been undertaking — for quite some time now — in Lagos.

DELE ADEYEMOMy name is Dele Adeyemo, I describe myself as an artist, architect and critical urban theorist working on a PhD thesis, which I'm about to submit at the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London. I've been exploring, essentially, the centrality of Africa in what I call the architecture of racial capitalism. Since modernity, I ask what has the role of Africa been within the emergence of the global circulations that  have crystallised into the current financial system? And what role does architecture and infrastructure play within the global architecture that has been constructed as a result?

As we already know, the Gulf of Guinea, West Africa was a critical region within transatlantic slavery. The role that architecture and infrastructure played within that began to define the geography of West African coastline, and that system of extraction — beginning with the extraction of enslaved peoples — continued into the colonial extraction of raw materials, and continues even today in the development of extractive infrastructures that both enable the extraction of value through the export of raw materials, and also by maintaining the continent in this condition of perpetual under development. We can now see architecture as a tool for the development of under-development on the continent. This is a large part of my thesis, and how I've kind of come to understand what I'm terming as the architecture of racial capitalism.

On the flip side of that, I'm also very interested in the ways in which people have resisted forms of extraction and exploitation. My work is also about interrogating these extractive narratives, and highlighting the agency of West Africans in particular. This is the other half of my thesis, which came from a personal exploration of an interest in the relationship between the macro and the micro. As someone who was born in Nigeria but grew up in the UK, I was born into the period of structural adjustments in which Africa was burdened with extreme levels of debt; the economy was transformed from a burgeoning postcolonial, independent, industrialising nation that accelerated  economic dependence. So my research is interested in how these grand histories and legacies surface on the individual level and how they affect daily life?

KOOZYou both discuss this notion of development and under development, and of the built environment as a tool which can be inclusive but also exclusive. Sandhya, how does that land within the context of Mumbai, in terms of the relationship between contemporary architecture and the heritage of a colonial project?

SNJI haven't studied the impacts of colonialism that deeply as yet — but being in a place like Mumbai, you can feel it; you experience it on a regular basis. A lot of Indian cities have been structured around remnants of what the British left, as part of the legacy of urban planning and systems of extraction that they brought with them. And we're still grappling with that legacy to a large extent. Having said that, I think that contemporary India has also played an equal part in keeping up that oppression; not to go in too many directions, but one could talk extensively about religion, especially the current political context. It's become a big sticking point, and we have policies and processes that are pretty divisive and very polarising on religious lines, which we have entrenched within the systems of governance. 

Historically, there are the number of challenges around caste, which is a whole other topic on its own, if we look at how that impacted the ways in which cities and settlements have emerged. If one were to look at [Indian] cities, what one immediately conjures up are large neighbourhoods that have been developed. But if you look at the ways in which different groups of people occupy the city — if you remove the built structures and just look at the people and the exchanges between them — what happens is very telling. Where we are located, in the east ward of Mumbai, the work that we're doing is situated within what's called a rehabilitation and resettlement colony. As an important aside: we use the word ‘colony’ rather flexibly here, because the colony is like a definable residential settlement, one that is built for the purpose of relocating or housing people — it's not a colony in the sense of how we understand colonisation. The words are deeply problematic, but in this case, they don't hold the same meaning in context). In any case, these settlements or colonies are great demonstrations of how violent architecture can be within the resettlement and rehabilitation policies. Right here, this is a direct outcome of the development of the city of Mumbai, through funds lent by the World Bank, when India opened up its markets in 1990; before that, we were a Socialist Republic. What that signalled was that we were open for investments from the rest of the world, ready to grow as a country. Of course, the very first entities that show up — and I think you're familiar with this — are the world banks and the IMF. The World Bank negotiated with the city and declared that Mumbai had to house the people that would be displaced as a result of the desired redevelopment projects — building expressways and freeways, essentially removing a huge amount of friction from a city that was grappling with a lot of congestion and poor infrastructure at the time. Building these massive roads and freeways primarily affected slum dwellers and pavement dwellers, so as per the deal made between the city and the World Bank, they had to be rehoused.

Now, what followed is that the city took the liberty of relaxing its building regulations. To illustrate what that means: the neighbourhood where we are working is five hectares of land, upon which there are 61 buildings. Each building has 96 units, and each unit is 226 square feet per home. On an average, five to seven people live in each of these homes. We are looking at a population of over 25,000 people within a single residential complex. Each of the buildings are seven stories high and 80% of them do not receive natural light or ventilation. So we are trying to create this ‘world-class city’, on the one hand, while intentionally manufacturing places in which nobody should dwell. This is a direct impact not just of the vestiges of the colonial past, where the British took the most premium lands to build their bungalows and townhouses, pushing the ‘natives’ out to the edges: we continue to do that even to this day, in the name of development — which becomes a really good excuse for what is happening right now in the city of Mumbai.

Here’s one example where the city authorities are working towards removing slum settlements; they are very structured about it, with an ingenious real estate strategy to achieve their aims. They get real-estate developers to come in and redevelop a slum, which means relocating the slum dwellers in vertical apartment complexes. This frees up land, which can then be sold for a much higher premium. If you visit Mumbai, you will see some really swanky towers on the skyline; right next to them are really dense, substandard apartment complexes, to which the slum dwellers have been shunted. We're literally seeing inequality and inequity being manufactured on the city’s horizon, on a daily basis. There are several communities or resettlement colonies like the one we work with, across the city. When infrastructure projects crop up, and people living in informal settlements are impacted, they’re moved into places like this. They don't have a choice about where they're moved; it's based on a lottery system. You would be hoping to get allocated a home in any one of these rehabilitation colonies, and you don't really have a choice: it's either that or you don't have a home.

KOOZI want to return to this idea of power found in the arts, in terms of social impact. Obviously you both work across spatial practices, but with a strong understanding and recognition of a broader sense of the role that the arts can play when integrated with architecture and the city.

DABefore we do that, I just want to respond to Sandhya. I'm not as aware of the Indian circumstances, but in the broader colonial context, spatial planning was dictated by the system of colonial rule. In both West Africa and India, it was not so much about settler colonialism, but rather a system of indirect rule. One of the things that interests me, in the community where my research is based, is that its geography was never a part of the Lagos colony. The community of Oworonshoki, as it’s known today, is situated on the mainland. In Lagos, you have a separation between the mainland and what's broadly spoken about as the Island: in fact, a collection of many islands that were at one point part of the shifting sandbanks on the lagoon. As Sandhya described in the Indian context, the British set up the minimum number of homes they needed for colonial administration — in prime locations on what was classed as the iIsland, and they set up the Lagos colony and administrated within that. Within the broader context of Nigeria, they had a number of colonial townships for administrators, but a large part of governance was to be executed by what was termed as native rule, by local people who are educated within the colonial system. 

So the rest of the geography — anything outside of the colonially administered township — was left to the system of native or customary authorities. The system of spatial planning is clearly drawn from the city that is administrating and orchestrating systems of extraction; from that focal point of the city, infrastructures are being planned across the entire territory of the country. You get a divergence between that organisation and the system of local native authorities, with which play a subservient role to the colonial administration. So as we move into independence, that system largely continues: essentially, you have a system of regulated planning under the authority of the state, and then there’s everything else. That ‘everything else’ which was broadly governed under native authority didn't receive the infrastructures and services of the city, of the city-state; as that gap grew, these places became defined as unregulated and informal — as slum regions. In actual fact, they were — as I argue in my PhD — settlements of a different order. The reason that's pretty cool, in the context of my research, is because the side of Oworonshoki was only encompassed by Lagos State in the mid 1960s; up until that time, it had developed according to native institutions.

Now, some of those systems of leadership within the native institutions were set up and controlled by the colonial authority — but because this set of indigenous institutions were left, to a large extent, to their own devices, there were systems of social organization that, while not necessarily organised by the local governors, were simply integral to indigenous pre-colonial society. This is where the role of creativity, art — and in the particular case of the community I work with, dance and performance — are paramount, because those systems of creativity were the social institutions that organised not only local politics and social orders, but also space and architecture. I argue that these art forms not only produce their own space; they produce space from an ontology outside and in excess of the architecture of racial capitalism. It's something that predates the spatial ontologies that we inherit and learn about in architecture school.

So when I talk about working with a community of dancers and choreographers, and bringing the architecture students to learn from and work with them, I'm also challenging students to think about design and architecture, not only from the perspective of alternative techniques, but from an alternative ontological perspective. There's a lot of tension in that, because the prevalent system of architectural education is, of course, a colonial inheritance; the systems of design, validation and learning that existed in pre-colonial times had other institutions. Fundamentally, working in this context is a great opportunity to really challenge the notions of how we think about how architecture was produced.This is what I'm trying to do with the students: learning indigenous techniques and indigenous technologies, but connecting them to ways of seeing the world, ways of being, forms of worlding that exceed Western epistemology.

SNJI could just listen to you for the rest of this conversation — thank you so much, Dele, that articulation was fantastic. What we deal with in the Indian context is just as you say; we don't have settler colonialism, as such. But the way the British operated in India was by not really interfering too much with our social or cultural structures. We had certain systems of oppression long before the British came in, due in part to this very entrenched system of caste in the country. When you look at how villages and temple towns have been built, you begin to see the systems of oppression and marginalization, going back as far as 2000 years. Then add that layer of European colonialism with the British coming in, it becomes a very delicate dance in terms of what we might return to, or what we might draw upon from the past. That's very helpful in terms of looking at indigenous and ancient knowledge; when you layer in the current systems of oppression, including capitalism, it becomes really complicated to grapple with all of those power structures. When you look at certain indigenous ways of building, there are also forms of marginalisation; there were restrictions in terms of how much space people took up and where they lived, whether in small towns or villages. You can see traces of that even as cities evolved.

Of course, in a city like Mumbai, things are somewhat more — and I hesitate to say this — liberal. I'm using the term rather broadly, as the city is driven by capital, but there is a sort of equalisation that happens across social strata. But even here, there is still hesitation around people marrying across caste or even religious lines, which affects how people engage with each other as citizens of the same place, in terms of what culture means, how it is made. Art and design do have a role to play here, but even our traditional arts and crafts weren't accessible to a large population within the country. We have Carnatic music, for example, which lower caste people were not allowed to learn in the past. Even these forms have their own systems of expression. There are of course many forms of traditional dance and storytelling across all castes, but I still find that questions of history and tradition to be a little bit more complex in our context.

KOOZAll of this is a lot to grapple with. How are your students introduced to the multifaceted layers and histories of these sites? How do you guide them to develop their responses — as opposed to ‘solutions’ — in a fundamentally more generous way?

SNJI would like to address your question about the arts as well; I’ll come back to that. In terms of how students respond: I'm teaching a group of students now and we have these conversations amongst ourselves and with the community; you can see nuances emerging from there. What we have found is by looking at space and at how everybody engages with it provides a starting point. When you start unpacking how one corner of the neighbourhood is used, it’s a relatively easy entry. So today, I was with a class on site in this residential colony, and we were looking at one little corner of the neighbourhood, thinking about what we could do in terms of an intervention. As architects, thanks to the conditioning, your immediate response would involve some landscaping, perhaps a pavilion… But we quickly realised that one single corner was used by several different religious groups, for their festivals and their events, and it became this very transient space.

Right now, they’ve just set up for Muharram, which is an Islamic ceremonial holiday observed by a one specific sect of Islam, the Shias. The same site becomes a celebratory location for the biggest Hindu festival in Mumbai, Ganesh Chaturthi — the festival of the elephant god — which is an eleven-day affair. That’s when you start to understand the complexities and the layering. We're talking about a very sensitive moment right now, especially in terms of Hindu-Muslim conflicts. But when you come into such a densely populated neighbourhood, and you see how people engage with space — it might feel like a coexistence of necessity, yet at the same time, there is a conscious effort to live together. This is something you don't see or hear about in the popular narrative, but it is real.

It may be worth noting that this particular group of architecture students is composed solely of Hindu students, mostly from upper middle class families, while we are working in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in one of the most marginalised parts of Mumbai. You can perhaps imagine the cultural conditioning, besides the educational conditioning. Of course, the School of Environment and Architecture is pretty progressive in terms of their pedagogy; students are trained to look at design and architecture through all the various critical lenses that we’ve discussed. But these issues emerge in the conversations; when it comes up, that’s when different people play different roles in responding to concerns that arise even from looking at just one little piece of open space in the community.

In the context of, you know where both the course and our practice is situated right now, the arts has played a very powerful role.  This role emerged or revealed itself through the way that we actually looking at the traditional arts. Mumbai is a city of migrants; these migrants have often moved away from their villages and their hometowns decades ago. As a result, they lose the artisanal practices that they cultivated back in their native regions. In the city, it’s a completely different way of existing; Bollywood has a huge impact on the idea of Mumbai, and we can't discount that either. When we talk about the arts here, we’re thinking about what a Mumbai-based artist might bring to the community, in terms of helping them find their voice and agency through different practices. We’ve looked at public arts, mural making, theatre — even rap music, which is very popular, as well as filmmaking and photography. These forms of media provide a platform through which we can learn about and share with the community, through the lens of the people who live there, and that begins to inform what kinds of potential responses we can bring about to improve their spaces. Ultimately, we want to see tangible transformations.

One very quick anecdote: right after COVID — as you know, India had one of the most severe lockdowns in the world — this particular community of 25,000 people were concentrated inside this neighbourhood, for nearly three months. Once the restrictions were eased, the local youths were very keen on engaging with us; they were quite frustrated having been confined to their homes, which are really tiny. So we went through a whole process of  bringing together young women and men — teenagers — to map their whole neighbourhood, identifying what each group deemed to be safe and unsafe spaces. Interestingly enough, when the young men had marked several places as being safe, the young women marked the same spaces as being unsafe, which triggered a whole conversation between the two groups.

This was also one of the first times that these kids were able to sit in the same place, because in this Muslim community, the girls don't usually get to engage with the boys. We built that trust with the community, including  community members as part of our team. The young men were quite taken aback by the women's point of view but that conversation helped them understand that the way you occupy space might actually make other groups feel uncomfortable. Then they said, how do we solve this? We proposed looking at one part of the neighbourhood, and see how we can transform it. They picked a wall situated right where a lot of the drug addicts and troubled young men would hang out. We would have never chosen that place, but they chose it specifically. The act of creating this beautiful piece of art on the wall just galvanised the whole community in ways that we hadn't imagined. One might classify it as a beautification project, but it was really more than that; it became a springboard for several other initiatives that came up in the community.

Again if you look at the mural itself, does it really draw from the community? Yes but we also chose to push them in terms of aesthetics. When we got started, it was one big party over three days, all because of one ‘little mural’. We realised that the act of creating and making something, however small, brought the community together in a far more productive way — it also changed the relationship of the community with the city authorities. Normally, it’s always sort of this fight against them. This community has always — perhaps rightly — protested against the city authorities for unclean water, lack of resources and so one. Now the community is engaging with the city to create better places, as a result of which a lot of major social challenges are being resolved along the way.

DAThere are so many crossovers with what you describe and how I'm working in Oworonshoki when thinking about the way people inhabit space. My collaboration with the community of Oworonshoki began with a collaboration with local dancers and choreographers who were putting on a festival that they termed as a ‘slum party’. They very much took ownership of that term, transforming it into something else. So one part of Oworonshoki — which was well known for crime, occult killings and generally being a dangerous place — also had incredible amounts of creativity; underlying the violence, was a strong sense of collective community. 

So when my collaborator Sunday Obiajulu and his friends started organising a festival, they were doing it almost as a protest against the way the community had been branded. It started that way but it quickly became a much bigger thing, celebrating the creativity of the community; at the core of it is dance and performance. Of course, while organising the festival, they were also running workshops for the young people of the community teaching them different forms of dance and collective performance, and putting on exercise clubs for the mothers of the community, to engage the whole community with dance and performance. So the festival — ‘Slum Party’ — became the focal point for development in the community; through these kinds of communal practices, people learn to inhabit space together. They're empowered through the knowledge of bodies moving in space collectively — that begins to transform notions of how people understand space, but it also transforms the confidence of people moving in and through space. For me, that critical engagement helped me realise that dance really is the language of communication in West Africa. It is the way that people organise. And their dance is connected to a whole series of different rituals, as an inheritance from pre-colonial institutions.

Of course, now, these languages hybridise within contemporary urban space. So I think it's our duty as people who are interested in architecture and design, to learn to communicate in and learn from that language as well. As I mentioned, one of the critical things that I am doing through this fellowship is introducing that understanding of spatial production to the students. As you were saying, Sandhya, it's important that students really understand what's there, that they go to see and learn how things are. I've noticed from the students  previous projects how easily technocratic terminologies get bandied around when discussing the need for urban renewal. . But one of the dangers of their formal architectural education is is that they become indoctrinated into the service of neocolonial, and neoliberal forms of spatial planning.

What I'm arguing is that there are indigenous ways of planning space that persist in the contemporary city; the way we learn how to plan space is even more critical at this moment in time, because Africa is going through its urban transition. Africa is one of the fastest growing populations in the world, and its urban populations are growing faster than anywhere else. Lagos is the largest city in Africa and  a mega city estimated at 24 million people, so development is happening there at an incredible pace. What I'm trying to highlight to the students is that when they see or draw a line around a site and label it for urban renewal and assume that everything has disappeared from within the boundaries of that red line — there's an incredible amount of violence connected to that simple act. Learning about the incredibly rich communities and their spatial intelligence — within those borders of that red line — is really critical before the students can begin to design.

SNJYou know, I was just smiling when you were talking about the ‘slum party’... We too hosted an arts festival, and we're going to host another one this December, in Mumbai; we've just finalised our artist residencies, and we also have mentorship programmes across film, theatre, rap, photography and public arts. The Govandi Arts Festival became a way of reclaiming or taking back agency, in terms of how the community wanted to portray itself to the rest of the city. These are precisely the points that Dele made, about the preconceived notions and marginalisations, from spatial discrimination to a large extent, but also cultural and social discrimination. It’s about learning that you might be economically poor, but that doesn't mean you're culturally poor, right? I think that understanding is so critical — especially for the architecture profession, because we've moved so far away from our responsibilities and our core function of being city makers and city builders.

I don't want to say the “use” of the arts — because that makes it very extractive — but the arts provide a platform for the residents with whom we are working to express how they want to be viewed and perceived, basically staking their claim in the city. Govandi Arts Festival was the first arts festival to be hosted in that particular part of Mumbai. It was not connected to any political or religious affiliation; it was purely a way to bring the whole community together. A lot of the artwork that emerged from that whole process had to do with identity, where each of these individuals came from, and what that particular neighbourhood and place means to them.

I think it's even more paramount now that we place on the agenda this notion of collective well being. Sandhya spoke about places that may be economically poor, but they're culturally rich. I say something very similar about the community of Oworonshoki. It's often classified as a slum or an informal settlement, defined by what it lacks — but I'm fascinated by what it tells us about what we've lost in society, in places where development has eviscerated the sense of community. This is really a critical idea; and in the West African context, it requires working with what I call ‘cosmo-technical choreographies’. When we think of the institution of dance,performance and choreography we are obviously talking about a highly embodied and spatial practice. It brings the community together as a collective being; and it was not only how pre-colonial society was structured, it also helped to orchestrate the rhythms of daily life. I’m thinking about how people worked — using things like the work song to synchronise movements when fishing, pounding yam or weaving materials to create buildings, or when crafting the furniture and instruments that animated space. These were  all practices that actually choreographed space into being.

Learning from this community has highlighted to me that we need these rituals in order to weave the collective being into reality. When we draw out space and plan it in the abstract, and then place an abstract value onto it, it's never going to have as a rich social life within it as space that's produced in and through these cosmo-techinchal choreographies. That's not what the typical architectural plan is trying to do. The idea of designing through rituals, I think, is something that we're aiming to explore. The students are going to design a school, which is also a space for the community to put on performances and hold dance rehearsals. This project will become a live-build project and  I'm hoping that the result is going to be a kind of instantiation of this idea of cosmo-technical choreographies — bringing together the entire community to create and choreograph space.

SNJI would pick up on something Dele mentioned, about places being defined by what they lack. We take the same sort of approach, noting that while certain sites might lack in physical infrastructure, these communities continue to live there despite those shortcomings. So what are the things that are really working well? And how do you use that understanding to  co-create and co-define these spaces? Parveen Sheikh, who is one of my coworkers and a community leader, talks about how the community brings the experience and we bring the tools, and these inform each other. Looking at the way the arts have helped — not only engaging kids in terms of defining identity and claiming space in the city — we also run a programme called the Under One Sky, which carves out spaces of creative expression, of rest and pause in a neighbourhood that is sorely lacking in places to just be. 

The celebratory Govandi Arts Festival is curated by Natasha Sharma, another colleague and artist working with students. Our students are also working on a live project with the community; we call it the Greening Community Commons initiative, looking at social infrastructure in the community as an opportunity for the students to understand the impacts of climate change, and how that would impact marginalised communities. It brings several complex issues together, but hopefully there is a space to co create and design, with the community. If it all works out, we might build parts of it during the arts festival.

KOOZAs a kind of final question, as we've been discussing alternative pedagogical structures: is there a way of creating infrastructures of pedagogical solidarity which extends beyond the traditional curricula, embracing different approaches to discussing space with students?

SNJThat's a really good question, and one that I'm grappling with as well. At the moment, I don't have a lot of experience teaching. I haven't been in academic settings in a long time, but one of the things that I'm quite wary about is the potential of trying to convert this into some sort of a pedagogical system. Are we becoming more prescriptive? The most powerful moments of learning happen as a result of moving through these conversations and communities in a very organic manner. We can’t just prescribe steps one, two, and three. There is a huge danger of oversimplification of something fairly complex. I find that as a practitioner, accounting for your own individual lived experiences when you walk into these spaces and have these conversations, it's really important to allow a project or initiative to reveal itself. The responses that might come up could then be varied and innovative, rather than formulaic.

I don't have an answer to your question; these are things I ask myself within the context of the curriculum that I've set up. I’m giving my students the leeway to explore, to understand the terms of engagement within the community. Beyond that, they can bring in their own experiences and past learnings, as they uncover and also unlearn in the process.

DAOne fact to acknowledge is the impossibility of the existing architectural curriculum to contain the kinds of social relations that I've been describing. Part of this project is helping to support the types of cultural institutions that would enable those social relations. As Sandhya mentioned, there are community organizations where she's operating that organise themselves in ways that the architectural profession and discipline would never normally attempt. If part of the project of modernity was to create this false distinction between discipline and practice, then making the students aware of that is something that I'm interested in doing here — otherwise they are studying in an environment that's geared towards the economics of architectural production, to the detriment of engaging with those social institutions that build and create community. Empowering the students to see the value of that is a really great opportunity within this project.

SNJThank you so much.

DAThanks, that was great.

KOOZThank you to the both of you.

About

The OBEL Teaching Fellowships seek to bridge the gap between professional practice and academia to enrich the dialogue and learning around each year’s chosen award theme. By supporting the development of new courses within accredited academic programs, the fellowship brings fresh voices into academia, reinforcing a commitment to innovation and the core mission of OBEL.

Bios

Dele Adeyemo is a Scottish / Nigerian artist, architect, and critical urban theorist based in London and Lagos. Dele’s research and creative practice address the architectures of racial capitalism and the contemporary lifeworlds that exist in their midst. Dele’s projects trace the contours of Black social life and its circulation through embodied cultures of movement to mobilise what he calls the Black radical spatial imaginary. Dele’s works have been exhibited at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale), the 13th International Architecture Biennale of Sao Paulo), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, and the 2nd Edition of the Lagos Biennial. Most recently he has presented the solo exhibitions, Licor-Mãe at Sismógrafo, Porto; Residues of the Sweet Purge  at Capel da Boa Viagem Funchal; and Wey Dey Move at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Dele is the recipient of the inaugural JAE Fellowship, the Canadian Centre for Architecture & Andrew Mellon Fellowship, and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Research Fellowship. Dele was awarded a CHASE-AHRC scholarship for his PhD doctorate titled, ‘Last Dark Continent’, which he is currently completing at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Sandhya Naidu Janardhan is the Founder and Managing Director of Community Design Agency in Mumbai. With nearly two decades of experience working on social impact projects worldwide, including in Singapore and Haiti, her focus is on creating safe and healthy spaces that support climate resilience, gender, economic and social inclusion, health, and overall well-being. Through her leadership, Community Design Agency has created positive changes within communities across four Indian cities. Sandhya believes in addressing systemic issues such as gender and social inequities through art, architecture, and design, advocating for participatory processes that empower community voices. A registered architect in India and a graduate of Columbia University, she is a recipient of the 2024-25 Berkeley Rupp Prize, the 2024 Obel Teaching Fellowship Award, and is a TED India Fellow.