Valletta – Accra

A Dialogue Between Mercantile Cities
David Kojo Derban, Ann Dingli, Guillaume Dreyfuss, Erica Giusta

Valletta Accra was launched in November 2023 as a travelling research project initiated by architecture firm AP Valletta with David Kojo Derban and Ann Dingli, as part of the Arts Council Malta’s International Cultural Exchange programme. The aim was to study two capitals across two continents, each holding memory of colonial presence and its wielding of mercantile potential. The team of researchers approached heritage fabric as a transcript of the evolving urban, social, and economic life of two harbour cities – Accra, the capital of Ghana on the West Africa, and Valletta, the capital of Malta, an island in the Mediterranean – both carrying the imprint of their role as adopted trading strongholds. The comparison of the two cities was positioned as a departure point for a deeper reading of both the colonial and post- colonial experience. In its parallel observation, Valletta Accra questioned how heritage might develop in line with authentic permeations of identity and urban ambition, positioning contrast as a methodology for revelation.  

The project’s resulting book unfolds in two parts: the first is a collection of four written and photographic essays; the second, a speculative design proposal for a heritage site – the Osu Salem School – in Osu, Accra. The goal of the speculative proposal is to restore the school’s building fabric as a significant heritage site in line with the learnings of the wider research project. In doing so, the design project becomes a methodological tugboat for a transferable, scalable heritage regeneration approach based on a hybrid act of looking, learning, and acting directly on what has been jointly discovered. 

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