Next Stop, Freetown: Creating a Black Heritage Tourism Hub through a Sustainable Transportation System

Since 1967, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Communities by Design (CxD) has brought Design Assistance Teams (DATs) to cities and towns across the United States. In 2017, AIA CxD completed its first DAT outside of the USA. 2023’s host community – Freetown, Sierra Leone – was the first Design Assistance Team project in Africa.

Freetown, Sierra Leone was founded in 1787 as a haven for freed American slaves. Between 1808 and 1874, thousands of former slaves either emigrated from the US or were repatriated to Freetown by the British Royal Navy’s capture of slave ships headed for the Americas. Freetown’s historic center has many landmarks from this important era, but due to the civil war, political unrest, and poverty that has gripped the nation for decades, Black heritage tourism has not yet come to Freetown.

Photos of scenic Sierra Leone and locals above.

In 2020, the Freetown Town Council and Mayor secured a feasibility study for a cable car system that would connect Freetown’s steeply sloped residential neighborhoods with its downtown commercial district, creating more equitable job access for Freetown’s residents and taking pressure off the city’s highly congested infrastructure. In March 2023, Bergmeyer’s former Director of Corporate Social Responsibility Mike Davis FAIA was part of an AIA DAT team whose mission was to imagine what these cable car stations might look like, and more importantly, to show how this investment in public transportation could be leveraged to redevelop Freetown’s historic district as a destination for global Black heritage tourism.

With the support of CxD Directors Joel Mills and Erin Simmons and team leader/planner Wayne Feiden, FAICP, Mike, along with architect Cheryl Morgan FAIA and transit system engineer Jason Schrieber, began studying the four cable car sites identified by the feasibility study. The first site, Government Wharf Station, was in the historic district itself but surrounded by disused wharf structures and abandoned buildings. The second site was inside the walled compound of Annie Walsh Memorial School, the oldest all-girl’s secondary school in sub-Saharan Africa located in Freetown’s busy Clock Tower Place district. The third site was high above the city in the hills of a low-rise residential neighborhood, while the fourth site – Kissy Junction – landed somewhere in an incredibly dense but impoverished commercial neighborhood.

The sketches above are some of the works produced during the DAT session for Government Wharf, the Annie Walsh Memorial School, and Kissy Junction.

The design team’s challenge was to mediate between the technical demands of a high-volume cable car system and the complexities of each site. The Government Wharf Station was designed as an anchor for an entirely re-imagined historic district. The team added a gym and locker rooms to the station at the Annie Walsh School and positioned it to transform a parking lot into a landscaped quad. The third site in the residential neighborhood took advantage of the slope to give residents access on several levels and bridge a four-lane highway.

The design team approached the fourth station by master planning an entire urban district. Rather than displacing the many small vendors that would have been obliterated by the feasibility study’s location, the DAT team moved the station to replace several underutilized buildings owned by municipal government agencies. A new mixed-use neighborhood development was planned for Kissy Junction station including high-rise office, mid-rise residential, low-rise library and civic centers, and a new public open space.

Simultaneously, the team was also hard at work on master-planning Freetown’s historic district. Imagining that Black families from the United states would someday want to see landmarks such as the “King Jimmy Market” where slaves were declared to be free, the “Old Wharf Steps”, one of the first masonry constructions in West Africa, and the district’s many “Board Houses” – wooden houses identical to those built in the Carolinas – the team sketched new waterfront amenities, new hotel development sites, new public spaces, restored market kiosks, and wayfinding signage.

Photos of the DAT team at work, reimagining and centering the historic district of Freetown, throughout the design process.