Wongani Mwanza

Wongani Mwanza is an architect, participatory urban designer and director at Transition by Design Cooperative, an architecture and design community interest company. He specialises in community-led design with an environmental & social justice focus. He has worked internationally for multi-award winning Krook & Tjäder in Stockholm, Sweden. He was project architect for the 2023 Pineapple Awards shortlisted ‘Meanwhile in Oxfordshire’ programme which transformed vacant retail and office spaces, through meanwhile use, housing 56 organisations at affordable rents.

Wongani is passionate about the circular economy and researched architectural systems driven by principles of repair and reuse, and was exhibited in the 2019 RIBA ‘Industrialised’ exhibition. In 2023, he hosted an RIBA Future Architects podcast on the circular economy with special guests. Wongani was a judge in the 2023 Architecture Journal architecture awards. He co-curated Modern Art Oxford's 2022 Adapt Transform Stories, a thematic series on community responses to urban design and creativity. Wongani has delivered workshops on community wealth building & the built environment for organisations working towards racial and economic justice including Good Ancestor Movement and Ten Years’ Time. He is an associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture and a mentor for POC in Architecture, which celebrates & supports final year undergraduate architecture students from diverse backgrounds.