Remesha Design Lab is representing Burundi at the inaugural Pan-African Architecture Biennale, presenting a landscape project that explores how public gardens and green spaces can contribute to more equitable, culturally grounded, and resilient urban futures.

We position public parks and gardens as regenerative portals for healing, cultural celebration, and social and environmental infrastructure for the city’s growing population. This project reclaims gardens and public spaces as vital sites of possibility in Bujumbura, imagining green networks and key nodes for community activation and supportive ecological and social infrastructure.

Historically, gardens have often been manipulated to symbolize power and dominance, particularly during European colonial rule, which enforced hierarchies that marginalized African landscapes and cultures. This intervention challenges those narratives by redefining gardens as spaces that honor and elevate traditional African ecological and ethnobotanical knowledge and practices.

In contemporary Burundi, urban life continues to negotiate the tensions between what is understood as “traditional” and “modern.” As cities pursue new forms of development and urbanity, there is a risk that vernacular knowledge, cultural practices, and spatial identities become increasingly displaced. This project proposes another trajectory: a future in which modernization does not require cultural erasure.

The significance of this intervention lies in its potential to act as a mechanism for equity and liberation. By reimagining gardens and public places as sites for cultural expression and social and ecological infrastructure, the project can disrupt colonial legacies embedded in postcolonial urban landscapes while creating accessible places for all.