who we are
.Ɛdan, drawn from the Akan word for "home" and the Scottish Gaelic for "little fire", was conceptualised by Carina Tenewaa Kanbi in 2022 to create equitable, community-led creative spaces that shape the city. It aims to address the gap in affordable spaces for making within the creative and craft sectors, while contributing to the building of more equitable African cities.
The design laboratory promotes spatial justice and empowers communities by using arts practice as instruments for free expression and city-making. Through its hybrid distributed production model in Accra, Ɛdan fosters creative imagination and production, creating a bottom-up community under a single structure. This model allows for collective research, experimentation, and dialogue around how just and inclusive cities are lived and can be built.
Alongside providing a platform for technical innovation and cross-pollination by celebrating and archiving indigenous Ghanaian craft practices, Ɛdan uses creative methodologies to gather data, stories, and knowledge from the ground up. By integrating research, practice, and the arts, it supports ways of reading the city through the lived experiences of communities and craftspeople, offering alternative insights to inform more inclusive urban development.
Its core mission is to promote positive change by combining technology, creativity, and community engagement to support the building of a creative city that is accessible to all. Ɛdan provides individuals and organisations with access to resources, expertise, and tools, while cultivating African and international networks of like-minded practitioners, researchers, and thinkers. Central to this vision is a commitment to centring women within these processes of change.
At its heart, Ɛdan is a creative laboratory that recognises the interdependence between the city and creative practice, using making, research, and collaboration as a means to imagine and shape alternative urban futures.
behind the scenes.
Carina Tenewaa Kanbi, Founder
Carina Tenewaa Kanbi is a Ghanaian and Scottish spatial practitioner, researcher, and creative producer whose work explores the intersections of culture, migration, and urban space. Her practice focuses on African spatial justice and mobility through the arts, with particular attention to how creatives build community and navigate cities such as Accra and Lagos. Drawing on a background in urbanism and migration studies, her research engages with the translocal movement of people and ideas across West Africa.
She is currently in the final stages of completing her PhD at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has previously held a fellowship with the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) and is presently a Caribou Mastercard Foundation AI Fellow and a CODESRIA African Indigenous Knowledge Fellow.
Carina supports the MA Cities programme at Central Saint Martins, contributing to teaching and research on placemaking and community-led infrastructure. Her work is rooted in embodied, practice-led methodologies that foreground movement, making, and lived experience as critical tools for understanding spatial dynamics. She prioritises alternative, non-textual research methods that centre community knowledge, including aural and material forms of recording.
She has managed and delivered creative, cultural, and research programmes across West, East, and Southern Africa, including international collaborations with Invisible Borders Trans-African Project and the British Council, working across areas of artistic production, migration, creative economies, and cross-border research partnerships.
Carina is the co-founder of Aya Editions, a platform dedicated to affordable African art by women artists from across the continent. She is also co-founder of WATWOMXN, a collective focused on building support structures and networks for women working within Ghana’s creative economy. Her current research and creative practice explore natural dyeing infrastructures and indigenous knowledge systems, with a particular focus on indigo as a cultural technology within West African craft, design, and urban economies.
She is obsessed with dogs.
Hiba Fawaz, Operations Lead
Hiba Fawaz works at the intersection of systems and storytelling. With experience across creative and tech industries, she specialises in designing operational frameworks that help emerging organisations scale with clarity and purpose. At Edan, she supports the development of structures and programming processes that bridge structure with creative innovation and sustainable growth. Her work reflects a deep interest in process, sustainability, and the invisible systems that enable creativity to thrive.l