This text by Courage Dzidula Kpodo is based on his architecture thesis. It is centered on a five-acre land project he undertook in mountainous Ghana understood as a living record shaped by history, ecology, and collective labor. Through the making of paths, the observation of trees, and the reuse of laterite walls, he proposes “future records”: material and social practices that honor past uses while enabling non-extractive, locally grounded futures beyond anthropocentric and Eurocentric design models.
I did not arrive on the land with a grand idea. I came with the simple intention of securing a patch of earth—five acres on the ridge of a mountain cluster in Ghana’s Eastern Region—so that something of value, ecological and financial, could be preserved. I imagined it as many people do in Ghana: an investment, a quiet hedge against uncertainty. But land does not sit still simply because you want it to. It shifts you. It gathers you into its own timescales and insists that you respond. Three years later, what began as a practical decision has transformed into a long, ongoing exploration of land, memory, and design. The lease ends in 2122 CE.
Thinking a century ahead changes the way a person regards land, which has its own temporalities distinct from the anthropocentric measurement of 99 years, an inheritance from British common law which offers practical permanence to a leaseholder.
Through oral interviews, I found that the piece of land was held by five different people before myself, with the earliest sale dated to 1928. I have come to see the land as a record, one that remembers more than the humans who move across it. But the land does not record alone. Recording is a continuous, reciprocal process: it happens as humans interact with the land, tracing paths, shaping soil, moving materials, planting, harvesting, and acknowledging its ecological and spiritual rhythms. A record in the land is not passive; it is not a sign of the past. It signals, accumulates, directs. It bears the stories of movement and labor, traces of hands and tools, echoes of what has been planted, harvested, and abandoned. But the question that anchors this text is not just what a record is, but what a record can do. Can a record be generative? Can it project forward, inscribing past and present into an evolving story? I call this possibility the future record.
To support an ongoing shift from the cocoa economy toward more diverse, locally-controlled livelihoods, this project explores how existing material forms: paths carved for cocoa transport, historic building materials, and spiritually-significant trees, can be reactivated to serve new economic, social and cultural functions. Rather than imposing external development models, the work asks: how can the land’s own material and economic record guide the creation of alternative futures, revitalizing not only livelihoods but also cultural practices, knowledge systems, and communal relationships of the people that live and work on it?
The Land that Remembers ///
The land sits on a mountain cluster reachable only by footpaths that rise from valley communities below. Each of these communities were founded at the turn of the 20th century, when cocoa cultivation surged and drew farmers deeper into the Akyem Abuakwa forests. Many of these communities still bear the names of the first settlers, the act of naming itself becoming a foundation stone to their memory. These communities, including Kojo Armah, Yaa-Aso, Obeng Yaw, Peni-Ama, Adjeikrom, Gyampo, are living records of migration and entrepreneurial determination. They are reminders that the cocoa industry was not just an economic system but a collective reshaping of geography, ecology and culture through thousands of decentralized decisions.
Walking the land today, you can still read that history in the vegetation. Cocoa trees are still cultivated commercially and recall a time when the cash crop was the dominant economic force in the region. However, cocoa production in Ghana today is concentrated in the Western Region, bordering Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer. That region is considered the last frontier of the cash crop in Ghana.
Several paths were carved through this landscape when the first farms were established. Historically, these paths formed arteries for the cocoa economy, connecting directly to the farms that were the primary sites of production. Farmers carried harvested pods and cocoa beans, walking them down to distribution centers that would channel them south to the shipping ports in Accra and Tema where ships waited.
Every journey along these paths was part of a long chain that connected a hillside farm to a chocolate bar in a European city.
The paths had different characters: some of them were gentle, some steep, as they navigated elevational change and property boundaries. The paths are some of the strongest records the land holds. Certain turns exist because they were easier to navigate along a slope. Some widenings in the path were created by stations where the pods were split, and the beans dried.
Yet these paths were never fixed. As cocoa production declined in this region from the 1940s onward, the paths came to connect to farms cultivating a plural mix of crops, plantain, cassava, maize, and forested areas. Over the years, I walked and mapped the various paths that led to the 5-acre land. The gentlest was the path from Yaa Aso, the community named after its founding matriarch. It was also the longest, and the preferred route of harvest by most farmers atop the mountains.
Along this path, I noted adjacent functions of rest, gathering, and water stations. Hunters would track game with dogs along it. I began to imagine the path as the spine of a new kind of record: one that acknowledges its past as a conduit of extraction but does not repeat it, instead offering a framework for envisioning new, non-extractive futures.
The Making of the Path ///
As a common piece of infrastructure that cut through separate farmlands, the path became a way to think collectively with the seven farmers implicated by it. The farmers, in order of ascent from Yaa-Aso, were Mr. Sakyi, Miss Nyadzor, Miss Sakyi, Mr. Amuzu, Mr. Mantey, Agya Kweku, and Mr Bekoe. In the immediate term, there was a real need among the aging farmers for a wider path, to ease daily commute to their farms. Yet we all knew that an endeavor of this kind would be a crucial step toward expanding the range of possible economies on the land. These discussions unfolded in three languages: Twi, Anlo-Eʋe, and English. In a surface clearance exercise that happened in July 2024, we expanded the path to a width of 7 feet—a width reflecting the ongoing motorization of the route as cargo tricycles travel up the hill to collect harvested produce.
Several children from the Yaa-Aso community came to witness the exercise, recalling a traditional practice in the Akyem regions of Ghana, when children were made witnesses during land-transfer ceremonies. It was believed they would live longer and carry the memories of the ceremony into the future. In a similar way, they witnessed the making of the path with the possibility of becoming the eventual actors whose needs and aspirations would shape the path.
Immediately after the path clearing, the farmer Mr. Mantey signaled the possibility of a market for local trade developing at the path’s terminus in Yaa-Aso. This realization became the first inkling in imagining a series of stations along the path, all in the spirit of that epiphany: where each stop could host a specific activity—gathering, making, learning, gifting, and exchange—with each one extending the record of the land into a different future. I wrote these stations as part of my 2025 Master of Architecture thesis at MIT, within both real and speculative dimensions.
A Future Record ///
Across the five stations, I foregrounded two non-conventional architectural material formations to support the region’s ongoing shift away from the cocoa-dominant economy. The first of these material formations is the Newbouldia laevis tree, a spiritual and ecological anchor grown across West Africa’s societies as a protective plant. It is commonly known as the “African boundary plant,” since European travelers first observed it indicates property lines. It marks the separation between public and private and is believed to neutralize the potential negative intentions of a guest entering a home. Even though it bears no commodifiable product, its cultural significance predisposes the tree to a range of mechanical, medicinal, and spiritual functions. It is known by many names across West Africa; among the Anlo-Eʋe, who cultivate and use it the most in Ghana, it is called Avia.
An Avia tree stands at the eastern entry point of the land. In forested areas and farms, its presence traditionally signaled past human presence. In some regions, it was a common practice to plant the tree by the homestead of the first settlers to consecrate the site and mark the beginnings of a new community. The oldest Avia trees in Abomey, the former capital of the Dahomey Kingdom, were planted to mark spots where caches of cowrie shells (once used as currency) were buried.
The tree thus functions as a record of presence, belief and continuity, pointing to where people first rooted themselves and how they understood the land they would inhabit.
Extending the memory of this tree into architectural design, renders the record generative, supporting functions needed to catalyze socio-economic change in the cocoa hills.
The second material formation I explored was the premade laterite wall. These walls were built by early farmers who settled in this region. In my travels, I encountered several of them unused and left to the elements. Over the past year, I documented them through photography, trying to understand the stories held beneath their surfaces. Over the decades, many of these structures were plastered with cement and painted with synthetic colors, attempts to modernize them in relation to dominant building practices in Accra and nearby urban centers. Their abandonment and collapse reveal the layers of material accumulated over years, turning the walls into records of evolving tastes and aspirations. My interest in the walls did not come from a purely preservational instinct. I saw more value in reimagining these walls to serve new functions in this place—a re-rendition familiar in material, yet strange in purpose.
In September 2024, I made the first purchase of a laterite wall from a family in Kpanikrom. Since the purchase of the wall did not include the land it stood on, we had to move the wall. We cut it into fragments that could be carried into the bucket of a cargo tricycle. The fragments revealed the palimpsest within the wall: layers of laterite clay, cement render, and paint. As I developed the idea of the future record in my thesis, these fragments became material for designing for new functions along the path.
Building on this initial work, I have since identified more of the laterite structures built by early farmer-settlers, most dating between 1910 and 1950. In June 2025, I made the second purchase of one of the unoccupied structures, a single-room-and-terrace building with mass laterite walls, built sometime in the 1930s and layered with cement and paint in subsequent decades. I am writing this text from Gyampo, where its careful deconstruction is now underway. The collected fragments will be reassembled along the 2-kilometer path, placing the research beyond speculation and into a continued material practice of reimagining the old walls
Drawing on these two material formations, I developed five stations along the path. Each station was grounds for testing how a future record of the land could be produced in practice, not as a fixed archive but as something shaped by use, growth, and material change. Instead of imposing non-contextual forms (and materials) onto the land, I decidedly worked with what was already present. The Avia trees, laterite fragments, and the path allowed the stations to emerge from the very material that held the land’s earlier stories, carrying those histories forward without freezing them in time.
This approach required engaging not only material conditions but also existing eco-spiritual protocols, particularly where human interventions intersected with the land’s elemental forces. In one such instance, a prayer offered by Elder Sakyi (also a farmer along the path), marked the moment of acknowledging a seasonal stream that crossed the path as an active presence within the landscape rather than a passive site of construction. In his pacification, he situated the expansion of the path within the land’s unfolding futures.
An extracted paragraph of the prayer offered to the stream, named Asuo Nsuma, in Akuapem Twi, and its translation is copied below.
Akuapem Twi
Wɔse wɔreyi lɔrekwan afa yɛn asaase yim
Na yɛn ani abue
Ɛyɛ adepa, wɔn nkwa so
English Translation
They say they are creating a path through this land
That we may receive visions of the land
It is a good thing, may they live long
The future record is one we all collectively participate in, to varying degrees and often unintentionally, extending beyond rural landscapes as urban lives, too, are woven into shared ecological and temporal networks of exchange and influence. My ongoing work seeks to delink from anthropocentric and Eurocentric modes of recording and spatial production, particularly those that position the architect as the primary author of future worlds. Instead, it turns toward marginal ways of thinking and building that—precisely because they are excluded from dominant frameworks—offer more encompassing and holistic grounds for imagining shared, beyond-human futures. ■