In July 2025, HUD co-organized the workshop Learning from Bukavu: Humanitarian Design in an unplanned neighbourhood. The workshop was conducted with architecture students from the Catholic University of Bukavu (UCB) and aimed to establish urban narratives and sensitive cartographies capable of expressing the development challenges of the city of Bukavu. Using their mobile phones, students collected visual data from different points across the city. The mundane data collection capacities of the mobile phone was then diverted into a form of hacking that allows users to learn from their environment, collect fragments of it, and reimagine it. The workshop explored the urban space through graphic material that enables the rethinking of these spaces. A reappropriation of cartographic practices, starting from the small scale, from the population and its challenges, to give it the possibility to plan or design alternative proposals.
The methodology followed in the workshop focuses on urbanity by starting from its situated and emergent manifestations in specific contexts, whilst being capable of reflecting broader issues. An assemblage of methods allows for detailing a reality generated in daily life, from self-construction logics, to the superposition of invisible layers, to relationships between populations and with the non-human. Recent advances in three-dimensional representation complement photographs and soundtracks. Generated from simple videos, point clouds make it possible to account for elements generally absent from architectural representations. Daily appropriations, informal economy exchanges, integration of displaced populations into the urban fabric, self-construction—all effectively invisibilised by classical representation methods.
During one week, UCB architecture students will experiment with various methods of observation, assemblage, and digital representations, in order to establish sensitive and critical cartographies that present the common urban as a succession of narratives in constant relations.
Teachers: Dag Boutsen, Javier Fernández Contreras, Aida Navarro Redón, Damien Greder and Mac Cubaka.
Assistants: Armand Rutale, Elia Kadesi Paul, Muchuku Matabaro Etienne, Baraka Carine, Kangene Namuyamba Charlie, Chishagala Nsibula David
Students: Birindwa Byumanine Gustave, Akonkwa Mongane Toussaint, Buroko Cirhuhula Adonis, Aganze Mubalama Christophe, Zena Risasi Yolande, Mugisho Ishamba Dieudonné, Cubaka Bashangwa Ephraïm, Kalome Samba Naomie, Kalume Feruzi Moise.
