Between Cairo and Cape Town: Architectural Education, Decolonisation and the Question of Architectural Intelligence

Abstract

This perspective article asks whether architectural education can deliver the transformation it declares, and what that question becomes once artificial intelligence (AI) enters the studio. The article distils two 2026 keynotes delivered by the author, in Cairo and Cape Town, and reads them against the UIA Global Survey of 345 schools in 159 countries and recent work on decolonised pedagogy and algorithmic colonialism. The findings demonstrate that schools converge on accreditation, studio learning and sustainability but diverge significantly on agendas requiring serious and committed change, with decolonised pedagogy in only 29% of programmes. Because AI learns from the archives and canons decolonial pedagogy seeks to open, this implementation gap presents the challenge of being automated, with Euro-American forms returning as statistical defaults. The key contribution is that this article links institutional evidence to epistemic critique and distinguishes artificial from architectural intelligence, calling for situated, embodied, cultural and relational judgement. The limitation is that this is an argued position based on published evidence and does not present new empirical testing. Yet the article outlines responses including comparative prompting, absence mapping, bias auditing and community-governed datasets.