Ports of Return: Rerouting value in the afterlives of extraction
Robin Swartz
Royal College of Art
Côte d'Ivoire grows much of the world's cocoa but captures little of its value. This project transforms the cocoa warehouse from a point of extraction into a place of return. Combining processing, assembly, trade, and agroforestry, it enables farmers to add value locally while restoring degraded landscapes. The proposal explores how architecture can support collective ownership, ecological repair, and new relationships between land, labour, and value. It asks the question 'what would happen if the infrastructure that currently extracts value from farming communities could instead be used to keep value within them?'
