Digitally Preserving African Built Heritage: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Architecture, History, and Geospatial Documentation

ABSTRACT: Cultural heritage across West Africa faces accelerating threats from climate change, rapid urbanization, economic precarity, and the enduring impacts of colonial extraction. Porto-Novo, Benin—whose architectural landscape includes Yoruba palaces, Afro-Brazilian houses, colonial administrative buildings, vernacular compounds, and sacred sites—exemplifies these intersecting pressures. Many structures are deteriorating or undocumented, placing both tangible forms and intangible cultural knowledge at risk. The African Built Heritage Project was developed as an interdisciplinary, community-engaged response to these challenges. Anchored at Northeastern University and cocreated with the École du Patrimoine Africain, the project integrates architectural analysis, historical research, oral histories, and geospatial documentation to create a multidimensional record of endangered buildings and memoryscapes. Using tools that included ArcGIS Field Maps, Survey123, drone imagery, and LiDAR scanning, the team generated interactive StoryMaps, dashboards, 3D models, and an ArcGIS Hub that preserves and disseminates spatial data alongside curated narratives. Situated within postcustodial and decolonial archival frameworks, the project prioritizes community authority over cultural materials while leveraging library-supported digital infrastructures for long-term accessibility. This article examines the project's methodology, ethical commitments, and digital outputs and reflects on the role libraries and research data services can play in globally networked, community-centered preservation efforts.