The architect in the city. Reinventing the city and its ways of living

Faced with its current challenges, particularly demographic and ecological ones, the profession of the architect is evolving by opening up to new urban conceptions and experimentation, in order to contribute to the invention of the city of tomorrow, with its new ways of living. The megalopolises of Côte d’Ivoire and Benin, and those elsewhere in Africa, are a laboratory for this invention. Issa Diabaté holds a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University, and, with his colleague Guillaume Koffi, he co-founded an architectural firm in 2001. In 2013 this became an architect-developer firm, ‘Koffi & Diabaté Group’, based in Abidjan. This interview retraces his journey, his reflections, his experiments, and his pledge to create a smarter, more inclusive, and greener African city.