M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast CDC is proud to lift the veil on our most significant and ambitious initiative, which we’ve been working on since August 2018: The Africatown International Design Idea Competition, co-created with our Competition Advisor, studio|rotan.
The initiative starts with the fascinating history of Africatown, a unique American settlement founded by Africans kidnapped and sold by the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin) in 1860. Smuggled across the Atlantic Ocean into Mobile, Alabama — on a plantation owner’s bet — they arrived aboard the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to America. Unable to return to their homeland after the Civil War, the Africans founded a new community in 1865 that exists to this day. However, it faces serious challenges.
In May 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission, with National Geographic Magazine announced that the Clotilda’s wreckage had been discovered in the Mobile River Delta, where it had been sunken to hide the crime. The announcement came exactly 159 years after the ship left Dahomey’s coastal city of Quidah with their illegal human cargo.
The sensational discovery of the Clotilda and the intense global interest it has generated for Africatown now powers The Africatown International Design Idea Competition. It is as unique as the community it was created to serve.
Juneteenth 2023
The Competition opened on June 19, 2021, when multi-disciplinary design teams of architects (professionals & students), urban planners, historians and others could register to enter. The teams were asked to consider all current and future plans for revitalizing Africatown, turning 2-D ideas into 3-D African-centric architectural concepts. The Competition program directed designers to create works that speak to the community’s history, its narrative of resilience, remembrance, plus reconciliation and reconnection to Benin & Africa, and its future socio-economic sustainablity.
The designers’ challenge was to weave plans for 16 venues on 4 sites across 3 cities and 2 continents into a single, world-class cultural heritage destination system worthy of Africatown’s exceptional history. Their proposed solutions will form the basis of a regional economic development framework centered on tourism. The winning concepts will be used to further develop and create what we call “The Africatown Cultural Mile™.”
The new framework that comes from the Competition’s design solutions are the first steps towards a larger, comprehensive planning tool, The Africatown Blueprint. It will guide how M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast CDC works long-term with the community to plan, design and then build our own future: a new Afrofuturistic utopia centered on culture, tourism, commerce and technology, all by design.
The Competition and the Africatown Blueprint Initiative rest upon the tenacity, vision and leadership of those African-descended families, long-time residents and community advocates whose lives embody the ongoing legacy of Cudjo Lewis, the longest living Clotilda African, and his Africatown co-founders. Cudjo’s recounting of his kidnapping and life in Alabama was finally published, in May 2018, from the notes of Zora Neal Hurston in a book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. This Competition, the first step of a long journey, is bound to change the way we assess the strengths of our ancestors who were enslaved but, after years of shackledom, bought their own land and built their own communities, despite the obstacles.
We dedicate The Africatown International Design Idea Competition, and the work that follows, to them all.
Viva Wakanda, our model of what an Afrofuturistic, Black Space can be.
Africatown Forever.
Read more at www.AfricatownDesign.com
Make A Donation to The Competition by clicking on the image below.
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