“I started becoming aware of the importance of space in community and the ways in which the built environment has been used historically, often for harm,” she says. Take Niamey, for example. The capital city, which is located in the southwestern outcropping of Niger, is split by the Gounti Yenna Valley—a geographic divider that the French took advantage of when they started to colonize the area in the 1890s with the sole purpose of extracting and exploiting the its natural resources. Niamey was established in 1926 and within a decade, the master plan for the city had the colonizers primarily settled on the west side of the valley, building Eurocentric infrastructure and housing that favored nuclear families. (In Africa, family units tend to be amorphous. Extended family will often come to live with other family members for months at a time, and families will often take in a cousin or other relative to permanently live with them. The houses built by the French were not conducive to the local family structure or culture.) Indigenous Nigeriens, especially those without financial means, were forced to the east, segregated on their own land. 

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“That divide essentially created two cities,” Kamara says. “On one side you had the European, economic, and political elite, and on the other were struggling neighborhoods. Even today, all that comes with that divide remains a part of the social fabric of Niamey, as well as almost every single African capital affected by colonialism.” 

 

Tapping into this history, as well as her experience as a young woman in Niamey, Kamara wrote her thesis, “Mobile Loitering,” as a response to public space needs in Niger’s contemporary, postcolonial society. 

 

She credits two of her advisers, Elizabeth Golden and Vikramāditya Prakāsh, with having a strong influence on her academic career, especially Prakāsh, who introduced her to theoretical, postcolonial texts and encouraged Kamara to explore ideas outside of the colonial, Western paradigms and narratives.

 

During her last year at the University of Washington, Kamara began receiving job offers, but soon realized that she wasn’t interested in working at a big architecture firm. 

 

“I was interested in doing work in Niamey, and I kept joking that I was just going to start my own NGO,” she recalls. “I repeated it so many times that Elizabeth [Golden] and my studiomate Yasaman Esmaili said, ‘You know what, maybe that’s not such a crazy idea.’”

 

In July 2013, Kamara, Golden, Esmaili, and German architect Philip Sträter launched United4Design, an architecture collective that, for its first venture, designed an urban revitalization project in Niamey. “My whole plan had been to graduate, take a month off, and work on a project in Niger,” Kamara says. “I had already been talking to some investors about designing modern housing that was affordable for buyers but would still make economic sense to developers as well.”

 

The finished project, the award-winning Niamey 2000 housing complex, was completed in 2016. Its design was a response to a housing crisis in Niamey. Rather than using the more-accepted concrete for the 18,000-square-foot building, the United4Design team utilized local materials (including unfired earth masonry) and passive cooling techniques to protect against Niger’s scorching temperatures. Taking inspiration from the region’s precolonial cities, the structure reintroduces the concept of intertwined housing, while also providing individual families with privacy. It positions six units where, traditionally, a single-family house would stand. 

 

Kamara had officially launched her own firm in Niamey in 2015 (she has spent the past few years splitting her time between Niger and Rhode Island, where she previously had an adjunct associate professorship at Brown University) with the goals of investing in the local economy and culture through her projects, and treating architecture as a social act. If existing boundaries were the result of a corrupt, exploitative system, then looking beyond those boundaries (and even breaking them down) could be a defiant act of not only resistance, but resilience as well. 

 

Kamara’s 2018 Regional Market project in Dandaji (a city about 300 miles east of Niamey) made her an architect to watch. Designed around an ancestral tree, the market features aesthetic references to the area’s traditional market architecture of adobe posts and reed roofs, but pushes the typology forward by using compressed earth bricks and metal for durability. A colorful canopy comprising individual, recycled-metal shading structures provides shade for shoppers and sellers and elevates the experience with panache. 

 

Months of extensive research, including an understanding of culture, religion, gender roles, and economy, guided Kamara and Esmaili during the design process. For each public and cultural project, she holds meetings with the community she is designing for to better understand its needs and how it will use a space. As a pre-design exercise for a religious-and-secular complex, also in Dandaji, Kamara asked local teenagers to write down and draw their ideas for the kind of gathering place they would like to use. The finished project turned a derelict mosque into a library that shares its site with a new mosque for the village—the proximity of the two spaces allows local youth to positively engage with both education and religion.