Built Heritage Preservation and New Media in Benin in Postcolonial Memory

Abstract

Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) offer important tools for heritage preservation groups attempting to navigate the challenges colonialism and its legacies imposed upon the built environments of their most historically significant public places. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technologies constitute a specific form of GIS that enable preservationists to capture images of historic structures at specific moments and create intricate three-dimensional images. They are thus instrumental in supporting local institutions charged with preserving historically important sites and doing so in ways that enhance the memory-making potential of more traditional means of preservation, such as architecture and oral history. The African Built Heritage Project, a collaboration between the Ecole du Patrimoine African in Porto-Novo, Benin, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the U.S. represents an important case study of the possibilities for LiDAR technologies to heighten the role of media systems in de-colonial heritage preservation projects in Africa. In this essay, we build this argument through a detailed analysis of our work on this project.

Local institutions charged with initiating heritage preservation projects in Benin and other Saharan African countries must confront significant challenges to their work, particularly those related to underresourcing, limitations in capacity, and climate change. Many of these challenges stem from the difficulties imposed upon postcolonial societies as they attempt to build community-based infrastructural support systems critical to the maintenance of public history sites. A significant means of addressing these challenges involve geographic information systems (GIS), which are computer systems that are designed to capture, analyze, and map data. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technologies are a specific form of GIS that enables the creation of detailed, three-dimensional images of historic structures captured at specific moments in time. Communicative technologies are thus enlisted as important support systems for these institutions and may be used in combination with more traditional modes of preservation. This fusion of traditional methods and new technologies will facilitate access to heritage structures on the part of both preservationists and consumers.

Figure 1.

Campus of L’Ecole du Patrimoine African, Porto-Novo, Benin. Once the Maison Premo, a French colonial building. Photo courtesy of the African Building Heritage Project.

Figure 2.

H. Killion Mokwete and Franck Ogou on the campus of L’Ecole du Patrimoine African in June 2024. Photo courtesy of the Africa Building Heritage Project.

Figure 3.

Great Mosque of Porto-Novo, Benin. Photo courtesy of the African Building Heritage Project.

Figure 4.

Debris from the ceiling above the minbar of the Great Mosque, Porto-Novo, Benin. Photo courtesy of the African Building Heritage Project.

Figure 5.

New mosque constructed adjacent to The Great Mosque, Porto-Novo, Benin. Photo courtesy of the African Building Heritage Project.

Figure 6.

Bahare Sanaie-Movahed and Jessica M. Parr with the King of the Yoruba in Porto-Novo. 14 June 2024. Porto-Novo, Benin. Photo courtesy of The African Building Heritage Project.

Figure 7.

The ArcGIS Dashboard, showing the surveyed buildings. Image Credit: The African Built Heritage Project.

Figure 8.

The urban landscape dashboard. Image Credit: The African Built Heritage Project.

Figure 9.

A 3D rendering of the Grand Mosque of Porto-Novo, Benin, created from a mesh of scans from the drone and surface scanner. Image Courtesy of the African Built Heritage Project.

Figure 10.

Homepage of The African Built Heritage Hub. Image Credit: The African Built Heritage Project.

Porto-Novo, Benin's capital city, is situated in the northeastern section of the country and was a major site of the transatlantic slave trade led by the Portuguese empire. As the later return location of the descendants of persons formerly enslaved in Brazil, the city hosts a memoryscape steeped in African-, Brazilian-, Muslim-, and Vodun-based architectural influences but lacks sufficient resources critical to the preservation of local memories. These conditions render Porto-Novo a significant site for productive collaborations between local heritage preservation organizations and external institutions using LiDAR technologies.

In this essay, we detail our ongoing project to integrate LiDAR technologies into heritage preservation projects in Porto-Novo. We suggest that, in the context of African countries contending with the challenges postcolonial legacies pose to heritage preservation projects, these technologies can facilitate the development of what Wilson (2015) has termed a critical GIS that invites a “techno-positionality” productive of a marriage between technical and critical practices. These technologies exceed the capacities of more traditional media forms (e.g., film, photography) to strengthen the agential abilities of local stakeholders in preserving their heritage, spurring economic development, and managing and narrating their own histories and cultural memories. This project represents a partnership between an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Northeastern University in The United States and L’Ecole du Patrimoine Africain in Porto-Novo, Benin, one of a collective of 26 African heritage schools operating in Franco and Lusophone Africa (Figures 1 and 2).

Our analysis of our work on the project proceeds in six parts. First, we offer a contextual discussion of the built environment that constitutes the heritage landscape in Porto-Novo and situate it within a conceptual framework that highlights its position as a decolonizing memoryscape. We then detail the imperatives and structural challenges that attend to heritage preservation in Benin. In the third section, we position ArcGIS as a form of “radical intervention” in addressing these challenges and continue in the fourth section with a discussion of the relevant elements of our own social locations that inform our work in building collaborative relationships with Beninoise preservationists. In the fifth section, we detail our methods and describe the ethical considerations that guide our project, and in the sixth, offer a more specific focus on the ArcGIS hub. We conclude with a brief summary of our work and its implications. In discussing our project utilizing an analytical framework that highlights the intersection of cultural memory, technology, and praxis, we offer a conceptual map for similar future projects that assist in heritage preservation in other locations in Africa and the broader diaspora.

Porto-Novo’s decolonizing memoryscape

This project draws on a movement by African museums and cultural heritage scholars and professionals that originated in the 1990s, in large part to counter colonial legacies in the ways that African cultural heritage is interpreted and displayed (Figure 3). The goal involves the implementation of an initiative that would support the education of African professionals at African institutions, and by African experts, rather than having them study abroad in Europe or elsewhere in the west. It keeps within a growing practice in the past few decades by cultural heritage experts (especially those outside of the west) that recognizes cultural heritage as a function of collective memory, and a collective memory that is not static (Apaydin, 2020, pp. 1–3). By placing African scholars at the helm of the interpretation and presentation of African history and culture, the movement could potentially produce a critical shift in the ways that African history was remembered, and to counter harmful, racist, colonial interpretations. It was one of several initiatives in Africa seeking reparative work within a decolonial framework. We see our work as building upon that of The Archives Nationales du Bénin, which is an example of decolonial work initiated within the 1990s time frame. It published a series of collections of documents between 1993 and 1995 in editions titled “Memoire du Bénin,” which includes some special editions on “matériaux d’histoire,” that document its complicated history under colonialism, including the history of King Toffa I, the last King of Porto-Novo (Hogbonu) before the kingdom fell under French colonial rule (Republique du Benin, 1993a, 1993b, 1995a, 1995b).

In the context of The African Built Heritage hub, a decolonial framework centers “heritage” as defined by local partners, rather than the Northeastern team, and documentation is only done with local partners (Figure 4). Additionally, the Project documents all-to-frequently neglected traditional African architecture (like the Vodun temples) alongside colonial and postcolonial structures. This approach also recognizes the messiness of cultural heritage and memory in a post-colonial era. As Egbers et al. (2024) note, “questions of what heritage is” and how it is remembered and represented are not neutral. Moreover, built environments are fluid and dynamic, shifting over time as the needs of the surrounding community change. For example, the Premo Maison, a nineteenth-century French colonial building of mixed colonial and Aguda style, is now the campus of L’Ecole du Patrimoine Africain. It, like several similar buildings in Porto-Novo, was part of an effort to save Benin's historic mansions from decay (The Observer: 2021) The Office of Tourism, near the historic Grande Marche, is also housed in a colonial mansion (Figure 5). The two buildings are examples of historically significant buildings with ties to colonialism and the slave trade which is nonetheless part of Benin's complicated past and is now repurposed as the locations of institutions that center Beninois as the stewards of their own cultural heritage.

Between 1990 and 1995, a trans-African consortium met in Benin for the purposes of planning and data gathering concerning the development of an Afro-centric Museum Studies program (Figure 6). They produced a detailed report documenting the state of patrimoine, or cultural heritage, as well as drawing out a budget and business plan for the creation of a series of African cultural heritage schools (Republique du Benin, 1995a, 1995b). L’Ecole du Patrimoine African in Porto-Novo, Benin, was one of what was then 26 such schools that were founded in Francophone and Lusophonic Africa for this purpose. It is the primary African partner for the pilot of the African Building Heritage Project, which is collaboration between L’Ecole du Patrimoine African (currently headed by Franck Kaman Oguou) and an interdisciplinary team from Northeastern (co-PIs H. Killion Mokwete, Patricia Davis, Jessica Parr, and Bahare Sanaie-Movahed) (Figures 7–10). The project seeks to document, through LiDAR technology, social participation, ArcGIS, and other media, at-risk building sites, as prioritized by Dr Oguou and local community stakeholders.

The ethos of the project remains dedicated to the vision of the leaders of L’EPA movement, with Northeastern providing technological and logistical support, as well as training where needed. The project began in December 2023, seeded by grants from Northeastern University, with the co-PIs and a pair of students flying to Porto-Novo for a week of community building, fieldwork, and research. Porto-Novo was chosen in part because it is the home of its rich architectural heritage that spans traditional typologies (buildings built before colonization), colonial building typologies and post-colonial types, and the site of an ethnically and linguistically rich community with ties to the southern Atlantic. At the heart of the work is the Great Mosque, a twentieth-century mosque that was built by Afro-Brazilian returners in the first decades of the century and is now in a bad state of disrepair. The building's roof and minarets are at risk of collapse and the building is no longer structurally sound enough to serve its intended community, though its steps and outer walls are still essential gathering spots for its community. The Mosques architectural type borrows from the Brazilian baroque style found in Sobrado building types which were dominant structures during the slavery era and shaped a lot of the spatial familiarity, building techniques of the Afro-Brazilians who returned to settle in Benin and built the Mosque.

The Great Mosque is one of the primary structures constitutive of Port Novo's memoryscape. In its more rudimentary conception, a memoryscape represents the imprinting of memory in concrete spaces. The processes of imprinting could include materialization in the form of monuments, memorials, and other structures, or they could include performances, such as historical reenactments and commemorations. They may also include the preservation actions that reinscribe the historical narratives attached to a place. More than two decades of work in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies has gradually expanded the conceptualization of memoryscapes and their constitutive practices. Phillips and Michell Reyes (2011, p. 14) employ a rhetorical studies approach that foregrounds the power relations productive of memoryscapes and constitutive of their fluidity, situating them as “a complex and vibrant plane upon which memories emerge, are contested, transform, encounter other memories, mutate and multiply.” In emphasizing the role of memorial practices in constructing memoryscapes as active forces, Red-Rosewood et al. (2022, p. 452) adopt a critical geographical standpoint in defining them as “assemblages of memory-objects, practices, and imaginaries that relationally constitute memory time-spaces.” Though our work involves elements of these theorizations, we locate our project most centrally within a conceptualization of memoryscapes that aligns with that of Senior and McDuie-Ra (2021, p. 2), which positions them as composed of three main elements: memorials, the surrounding built environment, and the related textual, visual, and “digital circulations.”

Porto-Novo is also home to an important marketplace and Aguda community, which has historically been squeezed to the margins of the broader community. In an interview with Mr Patterson, an important member of the Aguda community, he remarked that the Returners were largely viewed as still “slaves,” despite their emancipation. Moreover, little was being done outside of the community itself to preserve and promote Aguda history, heritage, and cultural contributions. His own house, one of the oldest examples of Aguda architecture in Porto-Novo is, as he noted, another at-risk site. The main house suffers from cracks caused by climate change-induced effects such as flooding and high-water levels from the nearby lagoon and the vibrations of modern vehicle traffic on the busy road that passes it by. A second dwelling on the property has caved in. He and other Aguda leaders have attempted for years to get in place the infrastructure and resources needed to try to save buildings like his home, which has housed generations of family, including descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey/early colonial Benin's powerful Medieros and Desouza families (Mokwete & Parr, 2024). Digital simulations, and eventually, virtual reality simulations, are being developed from the scans that will allow for study by African architects and engineers to try to repair at-risk buildings, as well as preserve the buildings in some form, in the event they cannot be saved. The preservation efforts are very time-sensitive. For example, just a day before the start of the June 2024 fieldwork, there was a partial collapse of the vaulted ceiling above the minbar of the Great Mosque.

The fieldwork and development of the project in Porto-Novo is anticipated to serve as a model for future community-engaged work in Porto-Novo, in other cities in Benin, and in other African countries as relationships are developed. Currently, the team is in conversation with colleagues in Cameroon and Uganda, with the hopes of obtaining funding to export the model developed and refined through the pilot program to other locations. It is also anticipated that the team will work collaboratively to obtain funding for technical equipment to be distributed to key African collaborators, including L’Ecole du Patrimoine African, both to make the project more sustainable and to help enable African scholars and community leaders to exercise greater agency over the project, with the United States-based team as more of a technical partner. This arrangement will help center African expertise in the spirit of the movement from which L’Ecole du Patrimoine African grew. Partnerships and community stakeholder involvement enrich this memoryscape as a working model for navigating a spatialized multiculture (Neal et al., 2018).

The importance and challenges of heritage preservation in Benin

The preservation of Porto-Novo's memoryscape serves as a set of practices integral to the heritage of the proximal community but given the role of the region in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it is also important to the recovery of memories of the time periods before, during, and after this pivotal era. Thus, the ability of preservationists to navigate the spatialized multiculture conveys implications that extend far beyond Porto-Novo and Benin. This includes the capacity to identify, confront, and negotiate a number of difficulties.

Among the many challenges heritage preservationists in Benin must confront in their work, some are intrinsic to heritage preservation more generally, while others are more structural in nature and therefore specific to the country. Several critically important Afro-Brazilian buildings in Benin, such as its Grand Mosque, are in a state of disrepair from neglect and a lack of investment or rehabilitation. The necessity for conservation and the salience of cultural heritage are mainly advocated by architects, education institutions, and cultural preservation agencies with limited resources toward rehabilitation and preservation at scale.

Other major critical challenges toward perseveration involve limitations in resources and capacity. While some steps have been taken to protect heritage sites, heritage protection in Porto-Novo has not been afforded sufficient resources from government antiquities departments to undertake a comprehensive rehabilitation of all sites. Furthermore, the lack of resourced organizations and advocacy toward building heritage also represents a diminishing role of the local community participation in defining their heritage assets and therefore loss of continuity across generation's institutional memory.

Legal limitations present another challenge to preservation efforts. In an interview with an official in Porto-Novo's tourism office, he pointed to a now-adjoining, more recently constructed mosque, and he discussed its construction as an obstacle to focusing on the preservation of The Grand Mosque. He explained that while the laws are changing, the currently insufficient legal frameworks toward heritage preservation for development impact assessments make it easy for developers to prioritize demolition without any prior assessments toward preservation. At the time, the new mosque was constructed, neither local nor national law could prevent the construction of a new mosque that subsumed the function of the old, historically significant mosque (Davis et al., 2023).

Additionally, climate change impacts such as higher temperatures and worsening floods threaten to condemn some African landmarks. In Benin, the Aguda architecture buildings, due to the material nature, are quickly deteriorating due to heavy rains and flooding, among other threats. Indeed, according to Lazare E. Assomo, director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “African sites are really, really in danger because of climate disruptions. We see typhoons, we see floods, we see erosion, we see fires. I would say climate change is one of the major challenges that world heritage is facing now - and in the future.” (Bhalla, 2022). Porto-Novo is specifically situated on a large lagoon, which stretches from east of Cotonou to the Nigerian border, and is even more susceptible to flooding, particularly during the rainy season.

And finally, Benin shares with many African countries a lack of accessible digitized databases and archival institutions. There are archival collections in the National Archives of Benin that document the colonial histories of Benin and Senegal, a large percentage of which have been microfilmed, but they require a trip to the Archive, which has only recently been renovated and reopened. Furthermore, due to colonization, more African heritage archives are being held in repositories in Europe and beyond. New digital initiatives, such as the Digital Benin Project, are starting to provide some remote access to resources, as well as documentation as to where (in Africa and elsewhere) archival collections reside, but historically, access has been a problem. ¹ These are the main challenges that this project aims to address, using a framework of humanistic research and new media.

ArcGIS as radical memory-making intervention

The aim of broadening access to archives invokes the politics and poetics of memory, specifically those that mobilize the productive capacities of media technologies. Heritage preservation involves a set of practices constitutive of collective memory, which references the shared histories central to group identity (Hakbwachs, 1992). Indeed, heritage structures offer representations of the knowledge and skills of communities from the past, and as such, operate as material forms of collective memory. Their destruction—whether from war, occupation, top-down economic policies, or other threats—poses challenges not only to the continuity of the past, present, and future but also to the very identities of individuals, groups, and communities (Apaydin, 2020). When viewed through this lens, the importance of mobilizing more accessible and durable mechanisms for heritage preservation becomes even more salient.

Extant research on media and the production of cultural memory has foregrounded various traditional, top-down forms, such as television, film, and radio (Lipsitz, 2001; Hedges, 2015). Digital media technologies reshaped the discursive field for the transmission of memory, enabling the transnational circulation of cultural memories. Notably, new media technologies facilitated the subversion of the traditional hierarchies of media production, expanding the range of actors capable of gathering, preserving, and disseminating historical images and narratives to global audiences. For example, the development and proliferation of digital archives affords broader access to the mechanisms of historical production and the democratization of cultural memory (De Kosnik, 2016).

Recent years have seen the development of technologies that serve similar mediatizing functions with respect to heritage preservation and other complicated practices involved in the production of cultural memory. The intricacies involved in heritage preservation impose additional demands on preservationists as they seek ways to deploy these technologies in ways that enhance the transmission and shareability of data in conservation and restoration projects. Moreover, those working in underresourced conditions must navigate further challenges, including those related to affordability and adaptability. As a form of digital preservation, LiDAR technologies provide a crucial resource in addressing these concerns and facilitating the development of robust documentation and monitoring projects. They thus constitute a new relationship between media and cultural memory, one through which local communities can work collaboratively with university partners to enlist spatial and social media in critical mapping praxes. These partnerships, and the representations they produce through mapping, form the possibilities implicated in what Wilson terms a “radical intervention” (2015, p. 3). This entails not just the recognition that GIS support and the accompanying mapping practices are synonymous with media but also the willingness to situate GIS-based projects within a broader discursive field that accounts for the ubiquity of digital information technologies. This highlights the capacities of media in facilitating the collaborative and critical mapping practices that underlay heritage preservation as a mode of memory-making.

Positionality and collaboration

Our model of “radical intervention” centers a partnership between researchers (local and international) and local community knowledge custodians through a social participation framework and the leveraging of technological tools toward the documentation and curation of local buildings. As researchers, we bring varying disciplinary perspectives and experiences to this project, yet we are collectively animated by an interest in mobilizing communicative technologies as tools for the preservation of heritages vulnerable to systemic erasure. We are a team comprised of an architect, a GIS and remote-sensing specialist, a historian and archivist, and a critical/cultural studies scholar whose work foregrounds Africana memory practices. Additionally, as two members of our team have ancestral connections to Africa, we see our project as an important means of transforming more abstract discussions of the emancipatory potential of technology into praxes that expand the historicity of the continent as a diasporic homeplace. In working with various stakeholders in Porto-Novo, we see our project as a collaboration between two disparate yet linked pedagogical institutions, with one standing as a well-resourced institution that prioritizes cross-cultural praxes and the other standing as a critical yet underresourced institution designed to train the next generation to utilize the most effective tools for the cultivation and sustenance of the day-to-day relationships among various local custodians of heritage.

By building on this collaborative platform framework, this research will leverage modern 3D capture through LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry technology to document the existing condition of heritage buildings and to create digital blueprints, enabling planners to prioritize preservation activities and furthering opportunities for future building renovations and reuse.

Through community participation and storytelling, this research activates community members’ role in celebrating unique cultural heritage embedded in their local built environment and defining and curating personalized building heritage narratives. The resulting information will be crafted into a locally hosted and searchable database of heritage buildings and will create the first-ever platform for an architectural heritage archive serving Benin and other African countries. The three-dimensional digital models will enable community-based education and academic research opportunities focused on vernacular building methods, offering opportunities for virtual experiential connection and providing focused outreach to the global African diaspora community seeking to connect and learn about African heritage. This innovative and interactive platform will be made accessible to L’École du Patrimoine Africain, who in turn will benefit from new opportunities for technical and sociocultural teaching and research. In the next section, we detail the multimodal methodologies used and describe the ethical considerations that guide our collaborative work.

Methodology and ethical consideration

The inclusion of oral histories, photographic documentation, and archival research is leveraged alongside technology. While LiDAR and ArcGIS technologies are critical tools in the preservation of architectural images and the creation of a sustainable archive to house them, they operate most productively when used in conjunction with more traditional methods of historical preservation. Community participation is an important element in these projects, as it enlists a broader spectrum of stakeholders in the cultural and economic benefits of constructing and sustaining local histories and communal memories. Moreover, these more conventional methods, which include oral histories, photographs, and other resources, enhance the capacities of technology to offer a more holistic approach to connecting local pasts and futures. We view the relationship between modern technological tools and traditional methods as symbiotic.

This ethos informed the work on our project at each stage. We recognize the continuing importance of traditional methods of heritage preservation and understand that assigning an outsized role for technology risks undermining the decolonial aims of our work. Moreover, as part of the exploration of Porto-Novo's “memoryscape,” we situate our work within a broader context that includes the neighborhoods and communities in which the buildings we were mapping are located. That is, in addition to the creation of the scans of the buildings and their georeferencing within the digital hub, we are working with stakeholders to document the communities who use these buildings, their histories, the arts, and music associated with them, and the material culture as well.

The ArcGIS hub

The technology-focused part of this work begins with the conception of the georeferencing of the buildings. The digital hubs contain street-level maps which reference not only the buildings the project team has scanned but also critical public buildings such as government offices, hospitals, schools, cemeteries, cultural centers, and religious sites beyond those scanned by the project team. Porto-Novo is in a regular state of building and expansion, and several of the buildings were constructed after those that are the primary focus of the project. This project also seeks to document the buildings holistically, as a significant element of its vision involves explaining the historical significance of each building by demonstrating its relationships with other structures in its immediate built environment.

The foundation of the hub's success lies in its robust data collection process, which combines modern geospatial technologies with the other technical elements of the hub, including the LiDAR scans. To collect geospatial data, two key tools were used: Survey123 and Field Map, both part of the ArcGIS ecosystem. These tools enabled the team to collect detailed geospatial data on buildings, allowing for comprehensive documentation and analysis. Survey123 allowed researchers to create structured forms that field teams used to input vital information about each building, including location, historical details, and architectural features in addition to images that were stored directly on the survey. These digital forms ensured standardized data collection, which was crucial for accuracy and consistency. Field Map was employed alongside Survey123 to visualize the collected data in real time. This tool facilitated the verification and editing of spatial data on-site, allowing the team to immediately resolve any discrepancies or issues with the information.

In addition to these specialized tools, Google Maps was used as a complementary resource for verifying and fine-tuning location information. The integration of these mapping technologies allowed the project to collect comprehensive, high-accuracy geospatial data. This data provided the backbone of the hub, ensuring that the architectural features and locations of buildings in Porto-Novo were captured in detail. Once the field data were gathered, it was transformed into a series of interactive maps that form the core of the hub's geospatial component. The results from Survey123 and Field Map were processed and visualized using ArcGIS tools, making the data accessible and visually engaging. These maps present not only the location of the buildings but also include key details such as architectural styles, materials, and historical context.

A crucial part of this process was the development of an ArcGIS Dashboard, which serves as an interactive platform for exploring the data. Users can view buildings on a map, explore photos, and read narratives about each structure's history and significance. The dashboard also allows users to filter data, zoom in on specific buildings, and understand how each building fits within the broader urban landscape of Porto-Novo. To enhance the visual appeal and provide a more detailed contextual background, high-resolution Airbus imagery of Porto-Novo was obtained and integrated into the dashboard as a base map, offering users an enriched view of the city's landscape alongside the architectural data. Integrating maps with narrative storytelling and rich visual content, the dashboard offers an engaging and immersive interactive experience for the audience.

The dashboard can allow users to view the buildings in the context of an interactive map that shows their proximity to local cultural heritage buildings, government buildings, schools, hospitals, and other institutions. It also allows the filtering of these buildings by architectural type (colonial, Aguda, etc), and then users can zoom in to see the 3D model.

In this study, each of the buildings has also been catalogued so that the user can learn more about individual buildings, and there is photographic documentation of the buildings and their neighborhood. 3D models of material culture associated with the building and peer through virtual window. This provides a deeper understanding of the buildings, linking their physical structures to their historical and cultural significance. This feature enables not only researchers but also the public to engage with the architectural heritage of Porto-Novo. The creation of the ArcGIS Hub is a major achievement of the project, acting as the central repository for all collected data, images, maps, and narratives. The African Built Heritage Hub integrates all the project's geospatial elements into a single, user-friendly interface, making it accessible to a global audience.

One of the standout features of the hub is its ability to present not only traditional mapping data but also the results of LiDAR scanning and drone imagery, which were used to create detailed 3D models of key buildings. These models provide users with a highly accurate representation of the buildings, offering insights into their structural and architectural elements that are not always visible in 2D maps or photographs. The models are created using point cloud data collected by the drone, which is then processed with advanced architectural 3D modeling tools. ArcGIS Online Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 serve as the digital repositories for managing and storing the data in this project.

By incorporating LiDAR and drone data, the hub allows for a more nuanced exploration of Porto-Novo's built heritage. Users can examine the intricacies of each building's design and gain a deeper appreciation for the craftsmanship involved. The 3D models are an invaluable resource for scholars and architects who wish to study these structures in greater detail.

For reasons related to security and data sovereignty, the digital objects on the hub are on a scalable AWS S3 cloud with upload portals located on the east coast of the United States, and in Johannesburg, South Africa (as the nearest portal to West Africa). The enormous size of the digital objects (sometimes exceeding 60 gigabytes) makes it technologically undesirable to try to upload them to servers that are exclusively across the Atlantic from the major fieldwork site(s). There is a CloudFront security wrapper to protect the cloud, and then individual objects are automatically assigned a URL. For the purposes of data sovereignty, the African partners make the decision as to which assets are displayed via the hub, and which ones stay private. For example, some of the photographs or interviews may be kept strictly for internal purposes or internal study, and/or the human sources of the data may not feel comfortable having their knowledge shared publicly via the hub. We draw our models for data sovereignty from discussions about who owns Black data. Although familiar with the conversations about data sovereignty within Indigenous studies, the conversations about data ethics within Black DH, which treat it within a diaspora context, were more immediately relevant to our project. Speakers at a recent symposium at John Hopkins, for example, made the case that as the owners of the data, the African collaborators and community partners were the ones to determine who was to be permitted access to the data, and to which assets (Johns Hopkins, 2024). With the rapid growth of AI, we anticipate working with our partners to design an AI policy to repudiate the use and remixing of digital assets from the archive from third parties—particularly commercial ones.

Curated data are locally owned through hosting with EPA web portal as the local point of access. Specific pages such as the digital prototype pages and the building CAD plans will be curated into presentation boards to share with the Heritage Office of Porto-Novo for internal use and also for future lobbying of UNESCO heritage sites status. CAD files and raw point cloud files will also be available for access by local researchers from the Africa AWS storage portal.

The data are then selectively made available for exploration and download through the hub. African stakeholders, along with the public, will have access to an interactive mapping platform, enabling them to create maps and conduct analyses using the available data layers. This initiative not only ensures that the data belongs to the community but also serves as a foundation for future collaborations with community partners in other countries. We aim to create a model that can be adapted and replicated, fostering local engagement and empowering communities through access to vital geospatial information.

Conclusion

ArcGIS technologies are critical tools in heritage preservation and invaluable resources in the mediatization of cultural memory. They allow for the documentation, analysis, and mapping of the material structures that link the past to the present. For societies seeking to preserve their most important historical and cultural sites amid the challenges posed by climate change, underresourcing, and other threats, LiDAR and drone technologies offer important pathways in sustaining heritage at the local and national levels. They need not necessarily replace more traditional modes of heritage preservation, such as oral histories. Rather, they leverage their inherent agential capacities to work in conjunction with these more conventional methods to navigate the difficulties inherent to preservation, and in the case of Benin and other African countries, constitute critical modes of decolonization.

These technologies also present opportunities for collaborations between local communities, university-based teams, and NGOs. Through multiple site visits to Porto-Novo, we have gathered a significant amount of data and transformed this data into a series of interactive maps. We also gathered oral histories from a variety of local community members, including heritage preservation officials, local tribal chiefs, mosque, and museum staff, and other personnel whose insights were critical to the construction of a social history of the buildings we scanned. In combining a robust praxis using emergent media technologies with more traditional methods of data gathering, we offer a more holistic approach to the study of cultural memory and the role of media in producing and sustaining it.

We perceive our project in Porto-Novo as part of a broader decolonial and transcultural turn in memory studies (Mwambari, 2023), one in which digital media plays critical roles. Light detection and ranging technologies may constitute effective tools for heritage preservationists in postcolonial societies to expand their methods for protecting their most significant historical and cultural sites and spurring economic development. As the primal scene of the transatlantic slave trade, western Africa represents a broad array of sites with symbolic value to communities within and outside of the continent. We have thus far made multiple visits to Porto-Novo, including one that involved training the students to use the technology. We see our work as an ongoing project and hope to return to Benin and eventually expand our work to other locations in Africa. We thus see our work as illustrating the critical role of media technologies in initiating memory projects in Africa and the Global South more broadly while ultimately demonstrating the ways in which the production and distribution of historical knowledge may be transformed under ethical and sustainable digital conditions.