Speaker Profile

Prof. Irene Appeaning Addo, PhD

Associate Professor (African Architecture) Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana

Professor Irene Appeaning Addo is an Architect and an Associate Professor of African Architecture at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

She is a member of the Ghana Institute of Architects, a member of the African Studies Association of Africa, a member of the Development Studies Association, and a visiting international fellow of the Urban Studies Foundation at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and the former Greater Accra Regional Architect at the Architectural and Engineering Services Limited (AESL).

She is a guest lecturer at ‘TheMuseumsLab’ and Yale School of the Environment in USA, and a keynote speaker at several international conferences.

Her research area is in postcolonial African Architecture, housing and urbanism. In her research, she uses everyday urbanism as a post-colonial lens to challenge formal, neoliberal planning ideals in African cities. Her work focuses on how marginalised or low-income urban residents creatively navigate and reshape highly sanitised “world-class" spaces. She has several publications to her credit including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings and technical reports.

Professor Appeaning Addo has supervised several doctoral scholars and mentored architecture students through writing workshops.