Wolff Architects Explores Liberation Gardens as Spatial Practice in African Cities

Published on September 29, 2026, an article by Toke Joseph examines how liberation in African cities often begins not with monuments but with gardens, courtyards, clearings, and fields—spaces of land occupation and gathering. The research project Liberation Gardens by Wolff Architects proposes the garden as a lens for interpreting these spatial practices, defining it not by landscape design but by relationships between people and land, cultivation and knowledge, occupation and autonomy. The article argues that across histories marked by colonialism and dispossession, space has been more than a backdrop for liberation; it has been a practice itself—cultivated, occupied, secretly inhabited, traversed, and collectively rebuilt. The garden, in this framework, can sustain survival, livelihood, and emancipatory imagination, hosting cultural production alongside subsistence and collective life emerging under violence and dispossession. A photograph of Isivivane at Freedom Park in Pretoria, South Africa, by Shosholoza accompanies the piece. The original English version is available via ArchDaily. Liberation, viewed spatially, concerns both the possibility of inhabiting differently and achieving a final condition of freedom.