Architecture student wins African grant

A CAPITAL architecture student is celebrating after pocketing a £6000 grant.

Thomas Aquilina, of Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, part of the University of Edinburgh, won the 2012 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship.

He will use the money to develop his proposal, Material Economies: recycling practices in informal settlements along African longitude 30ºE, which takes the scholarship’s theme of resources and addresses recycling in informal African settlements.

He said: “Rather than looking at the informal settlement as a problem, I want to look at it as an inspiration – that its very informality can achieve efficient and entrepreneurial practices of recycling.”