Tamale Old Airfield | Urban Furnishing(s)

This term, the [A]FA Tamale Old Airfield | Urban Furnishing(s) project enters the design, prototyping, and construction drawing phase. The lab continues as an ongoing project toward implementation later in 2026 and is therefore closed to new participants.

[A]FA has been transforming the Tamale Old Airfield in Tamale, Ghana, into a public landscape through a series of projected and realized spatial interventions, commissioned by the local municipality. Since 2020, [A]FA has committed to a long-term engagement with what it has termed Tamale’s inner-urban peripheries—areas at once central and peripheral—using research and design as tools to mediate between urban development and urban ecologies. With a dual focus on the research-driven Tamale Inner Urban Ecologies (TIUE) AfricaUniNet project and the design-and-implementation-oriented Tamale Old Airfield (TOA) commission, the lab has developed layered spatial strategies in close collaboration with municipal authorities, traditional leaders, and partnering institutions and individuals. The aim is a sensitive yet remarkable transformation of the vast former airfield into a shared urban landscape—a place for cultural, recreational, and economic activity.  

The most recent project phase continued—but also shifted—the work initiated by the Tamale Territories Matter team (2023–2024), which explored the interface between material innovation and landscape transformation. That phase defined a strategy and language for topographical interventions, responding to infrastructural and environmental conditions as well as to the colonial legacy of the site—a former runway constructed under the British regime—while giving form to a situated architectural imagination. At the urban scale, through the definition of five programmatic zones and the incorporation of vegetation, shade, and surface interventions, the project began to reimagine public space as an open, multi-species ecology—one in which wildness is not excluded but invited back into the urban fabric.

Following the first phase of tree transplantation in May 2025, the current stage turns to the design of seating and meeting devices—urban furnishings shaped by a topographical approach and principles of human and non-human cohabitation. Merging material research with landscape design, and body–space investigations with the urban scale, the lab project operates across multiple realms—from the tactile to the territorial. With shifting parameters and the momentum of earlier interventions, a new and responsive design direction is unfolding, led by a team formed in October 2025.

Baerbel Mueller, with Abdul-Rauf Issahaque