ARCHITECTURE AND DEVELOPMENT, Israeli construction in sub-Saharan Africa and the settler colonial imagination, 1958-1973

308pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Duke University Press, Durham, 2022

ISBN: 9781478017882

Ayala Levin on how Israel became involved in the modernisation of governance, education, and agriculture in Africa, and how African leaders chose to work with Israel to forge new South-South connections. 

Includes analyses of the design and construction of governmental projects in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia.

“A remarkable addition to the growing literature on the intrinsic plurality of global development experiences. Placing architectural expertise at the center of knowledge transfer between the newly-formed nation-states of Israel and on the African continent, Ayala Levin depicts state building as a parallel activity being undertaken by both provider and receiver of expertise, undoing received notions about ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ contexts. The sections comparing Israeli approaches toward kibbutzim at home and rural-urban migration patterns in Sierra Leone and Nigeria are nothing short of spectacular.” Arindam Dutta, author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility

"The book is fascinating in the way it engages the post-independence dilemma faced by most of the postcolonial African states in the years 1958-1973 ... Architecture and Development is a detailed and analytical investigation of that state-building moment." Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture