We caught up with Kabage Karanja, co-founder and co-director of Cave_bureau, ahead of the Living Cities Forum in Sydney and Melbourne.

Timothy Alouani-Roby: Please tell me a bit about your background first, both personally and professionally.

Kabage Karanja: I was born and bred in Kenya, in East Africa, where I began as a young visual artist, and eventually broke into architecture in the UK, where I qualified as an architect. I returned home to Kenya where I worked for a year before getting fired from a big firm. It was no surprise that I grew apprehensive about my position as an architect, but soon got the courage to mold a safe space to explore the disjointed origins of architecture by researching caves. It was great that I shared this interest with Stella Mutegi, who I founded Cave_bureau with in 2014. We grew a young cohort of cavers, and this year we celebrate ten years of practice.

You talk about the “context of the African city” and “our African position” at Cave_bureau. What defines this context and position – or, what are they defined against?

The African city has its colonial peculiarities, and those of the commonwealth which Kenya falls under find it hard to grapple with the often-fixed garden city morphologies and hardline tropical modernist grain. This infrastructure has its beauties and disfunctions in equal measure, and in most part is in a state of disrepair, disjointed from the natural systems outside the city.

Architects in African cities, including us, often find it difficult to critically respond to these complex urban and social conditions due to many factors, one of which is the missing deep time link and reference point of origin to the natural orders. The cave and the interlinked natural systems are infrastructural models that can be used to reverse these trauma exerted on rural and urban lands.

How do you understand decolonisation in relation to architecture, and what kind of power do architects have in enacting it?

Decolonisation at its heart is geophysical, just as colonisation was and still is an ongoing geological and social process. Architecture does not operate outside these parameters, nor is it ever neutral. It is the silent scaffolding that enables the making and breaking of worlds. We have only recently accepted the practice of architecture as a geological force that underpins the Anthropocene. This new age has its legacy entrenched in the imperial and colonial era that was and still is entrenched with extreme precision. Our very own codes of conduct and ethics more often than not implicate us in the environmental and social injustices we perpetuate.

Related: Tosin Oshinowo and architecture in the Global South

To take a quote from Cave_bureau’s website: “… movements of resistance not limited to Kenya were always orchestrated from the rural hinterlands of natural systems such as forests, caves, valleys, and mountains, constantly in tension with the disjointed colonial towns and cities. So by definition the post colonial African city cannot be fully understood without the past and present realities of the rural backdrop, a friction of what we call rural-urbanity.” It brings to mind a situation such as the Algerian war of independence. Do you have any thoughts about how this kind of approach might apply in a post-colonial setting such as Australia?

Yes, I can see that connection. Truth is, local studios are much better equipped that I would be to reimage what kind of futures can be generated through such an approach here. Yulendj Weelam Design Research lab would be a good place to start.

What are you hoping to bring to the table at Living Cities this year in Australia?

Well, in the context of the Living Cities theme of ‘common interests,’ I would like to speak on the missing link here that touches on the under common interest. When looked at historically, the theme is very problematic – common interests were rarely about extending any common rights or interests to indigenous people. In fact, this legacy in many parts of the world remains within the geographies of the so-called commonwealth nations that Australia is a part of. I feel more inclined to interrogate our under-common interests that lie beneath, where caves, forests, deserts and valleys were, and still are used as spaces of decolonial resistance, enabling us to take up the urgent and yet creative movement for climate justice, and equal rights for all people around the world. A kind of down under reflection of our common interests.

The Living Cities Forum takes place on September 18th in Melbourne and September 20th in Sydney, 2024.

Living Cities Forum
livingcitiesforum.org​

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