Idris Elba and Norman FosterFoster + Partners is working with actor Idris Elba on plans for an ‘eco-city’ on an island off the coast of Sierra Leone. Elba, best known as the star of BBC police drama Luther, has revealed ambitions to regenerate Sherbro Island, a 600km² tropical island off the coast of the West African country, working with Norman Foster’s practice.
Fosters will oversee the overall masterplan and landscape architecture for the megaproject alongside international architecture firm Sasaki Associates, reports the BBC. Elba, whose father was born in Sierra Leone, is spearheading the project alongside East London childhood friend Siaka Stevens, who is the grandson of a former Sierra Leonean president.
Stevens told the BBC he wants the island to become an ‘Afro-dynamic eco-city’ based on African cultural values, putting community, collaboration and nature at the fore. Plans for Sherbro Island include a wind and solar farm built by Octopus Energy Generation, with construction scheduled to begin this year depending on weather conditions.
The island currently has no access to mains electricity. The project is to be funded through a public-private partnership with investment ‘drawn from a wide range of sources’, including Lloyd’s, and is expected to cost billions of dollars.
Project coordinator Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) made a deal with the Sierra Leonean government in 2019 to develop the island.
At the time, the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio, expressed hopes for Sherbro to become ‘an economic engine for our country and neighbours’. The island will operate on a separate legal and economic system to mainland Sierra Leone, becoming a ‘designated special economic zone’, according to the BBC. Elba said they originally hoped to bring ‘bring tourism to the most incredible 19 miles of beachfront’ on Sherbro before the plans developed into something different, as Stevens realised ‘Sierra Leone wasn’t ready for that level of tourism’.
With the project, Elba hopes to bring wind-powered renewable electricity to Sierra Leone for the first time, and create a model for a ‘self-reliant’ economy that ‘feeds itself and has growth potential’.
The 51-year-old actor told the BBC: ‘I’m very keen to reframe the way Africa is viewed … as an aid model’, adding that the idea was ‘a dream … but I work in the make-believe business’. Stevens said development would begin around Bonthe, the island’s main town, but the scope of the project spanned the entire island.
He added that Sherbro, which had a population of 30,000 as of the last official record in 2013, could potentially accommodate a population of up to a million people following its regeneration. Elba added: ‘The character of the island hopefully will remain intact. It’s a beautiful, green part of the world and we don’t want to disturb that.’
