Oluwatise Samuel Oyewole

Advisor: Shawn Bailey

The image contrasts nature and industry in the Niger Delta, featuring a thatched hut, swimming figures, and a canoe silhouette alongside flaring stacks and machinery. Text on the left provides context about the region and project details.
The collage depicts rural waterside life, featuring wooden boats, thatched structures, mangroves, and fishing activities like nets and baskets of fish. Scenes of people engaging with muddy banks and waterways highlight the natural and cultural environment.
The collage captures cultural and aquatic scenes, including rituals, boat races, traditional artifacts, and lively village life. Highlights include masked figures, ceremonial canoes, and a sawfish in a tranquil aquatic setting.
A black and white collage photo depicting a group of men armed with guns, standing together in a serious demeanor.
The hand-drawn map shows a riverside area with green fields, brown agricultural patches, and a settlement of small black squares near the left riverbank. Roads connect the settlement to surrounding areas, illustrating land use and topography.

ARUKEGHEZI "Born in a canoe"

Design Activism in the Delta

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria, West Africa, spans 26,000 square kilometers1, making it the third-largest delta in the world. This vast region of marshlands, rivers, rivulets, and springs has served as home to diverse ethnic minorities long before colonial contact. Its geography ranges from coastal sandy ridges to mangrove and freshwater swamps, and lowland forests. Rich in hydrocarbons and natural gas, the Niger Delta is Nigeria’s economic backbone, providing the largest share of the nation’s foreign revenue2. 

However, extensive oil and gas exploration has left a trail of environmental devastation, affecting water bodies, biodiversity, and agricultural productivity. Pollution has eroded the traditional livelihoods and cultural practices of the region’s communities, sparking decades of protests and, at times, militarized conflict.3 These challenges underscore the urgent need for design interventions that advocate for ecological restoration, social empowerment, and economic justice. 

Design activism, as defined by Alastair Fuad-Luke, provides a framework to create counter-narratives that foster positive environmental, social, and economic change.4 This thesis aims to leverage architectural design to challenge the current status quo, addressing systemic issues affecting the Niger Delta. 

This project aims to use Architectural design as a medium of creating an alternative to the current status quo, by doing so also shedding more light on the systems and structures that currently affect the region. This project hopes to use approaches focused on the “Role of Women,” “Arts, Culture and Animism” as well as the “Geography” to create a radical remit around the Niger Delta. 

By employing intersectional sustainable and adaptive architectural strategies, this research seeks to propose transformative architectural design interventions for the Niger Delta’s polluted water bodies and marginalized communities. It offers a template for economically and socially disadvantaged regions globally, using architecture design as a medium for advocacy and change.