How Kumasi is becoming West Africa’s design capital
A wave of young architects, craftspeople and urban planners are reclaiming Kumasi’s built environment, blending Asante heritage with contemporary spatial thinking.
Stand at the entrance to Kumasi’s Kejetia market complex and look at what surrounds it: a terminal designed with flowing concrete arcs that echo traditional Asante roof forms; street furniture in steel and local teak; wayfinding graphics drawn from kente weave patterns. This is not accident. This is intention.nnKumasi is in the middle of a design renaissance, led by a generation of architects, urban planners, graphic designers and craftspeople who have decided that the Ashanti capital’s built environment should look like it knows where it comes from.nnAt the centre of this movement is Kote Design Collective, a loose network of about forty designers based across Kumasi, Accra and the diaspora who collaborate on public commissions and private projects. Their work has included a new farmers’ market structure in Asafo that won a Commonwealth Architecture Award in 2025, and a community library in Bantama whose facade is a structural interpretation of the adinkra symbol for knowledge.nn”We’re not doing ‘cultural tourism architecture’ — the fake thatched roofs and mud walls for tourists,” says architect Kofi Asante-Mensah, one of the collective’s founders. “We’re asking what it actually means to build well for this climate, this culture, this economy, right now.”nnThe Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly has responded to the movement by commissioning Kote to develop a design code for the central business district — a set of guidelines that encourages new buildings to respond to Asante spatial tradition while remaining flexible enough to meet commercial needs.nnThe code proposes minimum setbacks, planting requirements, and a colour palette derived from the natural pigments of kente weaving — requiring not uniformity but coherence.
