Urbanizing African cities, Lagos among them, negotiate memories of violence and atrocities that shape daily life yet remain unaddressed. These unreconciled histories feed fragility, deepening social fractures and exclusion. This research responds by positioning memory-making—for reconciliation, healing, and justice—as a spatial tool to confront these conditions. Against this horizon, and unlike other disciplines, architecture has failed to take up this ethical project. The research revives repressed spatial and design intelligences developed in resistance and survival, often dismissed as “informality,” and reaffirms Yoruba proverbs—codified ontologies capable of shaping how we read and make space. Together, they reveal alternative strategies for addressing memory and its protection, equipping architecture to engage memory as a domain of justice and reconciliation. As an urgent step toward designing for equity, this research catalogs architectures of resistance and Yoruba proverbs relating to memory, broadening architecture’s capacity to evoke lasting intergenerational impact across Lagos, Africa, and beyond.

Olorunfemi Adewuyi is an architectural designer and researcher based in Lagos, Nigeria. He is the founder of Omi Collective (2023), an antidisciplinary design and research group working across architecture, urbanism, objects, and research. Omi—meaning “water” in Yoruba, his mother tongue—reflects Adewuyi’s sustained engagement with the politics and poetics of this resource. Adewuyi approaches architecture as a method for producing intelligence from contradiction, studying and transforming the pressures of material life, culture, memory, and power into (plat)forms that can be inhabited, questioned, and extended. Through this process, his work brings latent and dismissed intelligences into view, reframing them as propositions for more expansive readings of modernity. Adewuyi is the recipient of awards and fellowships, including the Prince Claus Building Beyond Fellowship (2025), Institut Français Création Africa (2023), and the Goethe-Institut Support and Connect Grant (2023 and 2024). His work circulates internationally through journals, exhibitions, and institutions.