New village. The recovery of the traditional housing model in VTCs projects in sub-saharan Africa

This article deals with the Architecture of VTCs (Vocational Training Centers) by presenting a few examples of projects built in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. In the first part, the subject matter provides a pretext for addressing the issue of the changes in the rural habitat of this specific geographical area. The complexity of ongoing events (geopolitics, population growth, migrations) requires the rethinking of social and occupational policies based on both educational programs, as an essential prerequisite for eradicating poverty, and vocational training, as an effective instrument for implementing new business firms and innovating production strategies in the primary sectors of agriculture and livestock farming. The adoption of these policies would allow, on the one hand, a decline of rural-urban migration, on the other, a quality response to the demands of a territory in slow but relentless densification. In the second part, I will focus on compositional features connected to architectural design and projects. In a context in which the settlement typology of the rural village is gradually disappearing in favor of informal small and medium-sized cities, the multifunctional VTCs take the pivotal role of new village by recovering and safeguarding the spatial and symbolic principles of the traditional housing model.