RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship winner Thomas Warren will apply lessons from off-grid African cities

This year’s RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship winner will travel to Africa for a documentation of off-grid living communities in the hopes of establishing a new model of self-sustaining food, water, and energy systems.

Thomas Warren of London Metropolitan University won the £7,000 ($9,000 USD) grant for his project ‘Africa 360°’, which will begin and end in Cape Town, South Africa. RIBA says: “Thomas intends to use the travel scholarship to investigate how future off-grid cities can eliminate the time consuming, costly, and maintenance-heavy nature of city scale infrastructure."

The Class of 2024 MArch graduate was supposedly inspired by the foresight of certain countries to leapfrog telecommunications and other technologies. The Earthship Biotecture project in Malawi and Irente Biodiversity Reserve in Tanzania are two of the five projects Warren mentioned as visiting to glean lessons that can be applied to the design of future cities everywhere.

Regarding his winning proposal, RIBA President Muyiwa Oki said: "We urgently need to make our cities greener. So, Thomas’s proposal really resonated with the judging panel – he plans to investigate off-grid communities in countries in Africa, where he thinks there is great potential for sustainable solutions to be nurtured. I look forward to hearing how his findings can help to address the global challenge of sustainable urban development."

Three other proposals from a new record 79 applications were also commended by the jury. They were Henrick Michael (University of New South Wales), for ‘Urban Biomimetics’; Qianqian Ma (Royal College of Art), for ‘Finding the Eel & Flounder: A Project to Witness Tuvalu’s Retaliation Against Rising Sea Levels’; and Santiago Fernandez Perez (European University of Madrid), for ‘Deserted Horizons: The Silent Crisis of Rural Europe’