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Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015
No full textThis essay uses an emergent transnational research project — a global encyclopaedia of women in architecture — as a site for unsettling the terms, chronology, and geography of feminist histories of architecture. By locating feminist architectural history in multiple geographies and histories, feminist practice can attend to the specific geopolitics of architecture and knowledge. This project uses a crowdsourced approach, rooted in local regional reference groups and writers, to facilitate a greater range of entries, voices, and expertise. Transnational histories are generated from difference and disseminate diverse models of architectural practice and lives. Biography is a central tool for providing these counter-narratives of architecture. In this essay feminist scholarship of the 1980s on women’s lives provides a critical foundation for the current biographical turn in journalism and academia. Life writing has long been foundational to women’s history writing, but contemporary biography, with its strategies of visibility, de-canonisation, and mobilisation around gender identity, also provides an affective politics for contemporary architectural feminism. The global turn in architectural history is enriched by an intersectional lens, capable of mapping the myriad geographies and differences of women’s lives, and the precise contours of agency and oppression.</p
Becoming…in Lagos: a time-narration approach to city-identification in an African metropolis
No full textThe “public narratives” of Africa’s largest metropolis—Lagos—in terms of “Ilu Eko” and “No Man's Land” pave a path to exploring “ontological narratives” which Lagos residents use to make sense of urban lives. By employing a time-narration approach, which emphasizes the narrativity of open-ended life-story interviews based on ethnographic fieldwork, to interpret identification discourses and practices in everyday life, this paper makes arguments in three aspects of becoming: “becoming urban” is not a definite consequence for urban dwellers, and thus the urban should be further specified to how the particular city—Lagos—play roles in life trajectories; structural constraints in Lagos make work and marriage firmly bound in the process of settling down—so-called “becoming settled”—from which different people narrate time in distinctive ways; discourses of becoming “Lagosian” are involved with becoming less or more “Yoruba”, which varies according to interpersonal interactions among people in everyday life.</p
Have Five Decades of Development Engineering Research Improved Sanitation in Southern Africa?
No full textIn developed countries, public health engineering has been closely associated with extensions of life expectancy and declines in infant mortality well beyond the contributions of medicine. However, different approaches have had to be taken in poorer countries. This paper uses cases from South and Southern Africa to illustrate the challenges and the responses and to consider whether these reflect a formal ‘development engineering’ approach. While external agencies have actively promoted a variety of approaches, engineered interventions were most successful where they took account of social, economic and environmental contexts, reflected local preferences and were developed by, or in close coordination with, the operational institutions concerned.</p
Natural disasters, aid distribution, and social conflict – Micro-level evidence from the 2015 earthquake in Nepal
No full textHow do natural disasters influence social conflict? We build on previous research by drawing more attention to conditional effects. We argue that damage and destruction tend to increase local-level cooperation and cohesion, as common threats and challenges supersede pre-existing communal cleavages. Irregular distribution of reconstruction aid, in the presence of pre-existing social inequalities, however, can dampen these effects and foster social conflict. We test this argument with a village-level analysis of the effects of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal: we rely on data on the exogenous spatial distribution of earthquake intensity, the number of violent events, and the patterns of post-disaster aid distribution. Our findings show that villages exposed to the earthquake experienced a reduction in the number of social conflict events. This pacifying effect is mediated by government aid distribution: as more aid is distributed, the conflict-mitigating effects of the earthquake are weakened. These results highlight the need for more conflict-sensitive reconstruction aid in the aftermath of natural disasters.
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Ruins and Rhythms of Development and Life After Progress
No full textSince the rise of capitalist modernity, communities across the world have been convinced by the potential of development and progress. This article steps aside from the idea of continuous and unilinear change, and examines contemporary afterlives of broken developmentalist dreams. By assembling ethnographies from countries politically defined as growth-engines in three different regions of the world (Brazil, Germany and India), we propose that development no longer inspires the same aspirations about progress. By exploring how material decay and shattered expectations become intimately woven into the everyday experiences of local populations, we show how the ruinous effects of pursuing economic growth leaves ordinary people to a life on their own terms. At this current historical juncture, we argue for the analytical productiveness of exploring ‘the after’ rather than ‘the otherwise’. This is pursued through an interrogation of the irregular rhythms of ‘life after progress’.</p
Hope, home and insecurity: Gendered labours of resilience among the urban poor of Metro Cebu, the Philippines
No full textThis article traces the labours of hope embedded in the everyday social reproductive practices of urban poor homeowner association members in Metro Cebu, the Philippines. It explores how aspirations for housing and land tenure security and the (failed) promises of opportunity bound in the urban materialise in the narratives and activities of women and men living in informal settlements. I argue that the sociality of hope, which propels and sustains homeowner associations, produces gendered labours of resilience amidst everyday circumstances of poverty, uncertainty, risk and displacement. As I reveal, these care-based practices constitute expressions of hope that are driven by moral codes associated with the family, industriousness and service to others. These findings reinforce the utility of hope as an analytical lens in geographical studies; one which broadens conceptualisations of labour beyond economic production to include, in this case, the emotional embodiments and reproductive activities that underpin people’s everyday resilience.</p
Chemical and Microscopic Investigation of Ancient Mortar and Plaster from the Middle Elamite Period Tepti Ahar’s Vaulted Tomb, Southwestern Iran
No full textThe Haft Tappeh archaeological site, located in southwestern Iran, includes remains of the Middle Elamite period city, Kapanak (ca. 1400 BC). The archaeological excavations retrieved architectural remnants, the most significant of which being the tomb of Tepti Ahar in the northern area. The tomb is constructed of brick with mortar and plaster. The bricks are more deteriorated than mortar and plaster, and it is interesting to know the reasons behind durability of mortar/plaster in time. The aim of the article is characterization of mortar/plaster of the Tepti Ahar’s tomb. X-ray powder diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, and scanning electron microscopy equipped with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were employed throughout. Samples are prevalently made of gypsum with anhydrite, and in some cases bassanite and quartz, soil minerals, and calcite as impurities. The crystal’s shape is large in size with rounded edges as a result of long-term natural weathering. The micromorphological features, with coarse grain sizes, have improved physical and mechanical properties of the material. The dehydration channels in the gypsum crystals suggest the influence of moisture changes in the environment within the burial interval. Thus, long-term natural weathering has rendered a dense microstructure as the main reason for the stability of the mortar-plaster in time.</p
‘A Matter of Practical Emergency’: Herbert Baker, Hope Bagenal, and the Acoustic Legacy of the Assembly Chamber in Imperial Delhi
No full textIn 1923, at the request of the government of India, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Britain authorised a specialist research stream. Its purpose was to investigate problems in architectural acoustics specifically related to the new Assembly Chamber then under construction in Imperial Delhi. The design, by Sir Herbert Baker, was unusual for its era in that it was refined with recourse to measured data and calculations with a basis in modern physics. The acoustician, or ‘consulting architect’, was Hope Bagenal, and his appointment by Baker in 1922 marked the first international commission of a British acoustic consultant. This article examines the acoustic design of the Assembly Chamber in Delhi and identifies the inputs of the various individuals, both architects and scientists, involved. Drawing on the archives of Baker and Bagenal, the records of the DSIR and the Guastavino Company, as well as contemporaneous newspaper coverage, it also demonstrates the longer-term implications of the design and construction process at Delhi, including its role in stimulating subsequent government-funded research in architectural acoustics in Britain.</p
Refugee Artists, Architects and Intellectuals Beyond Europe in the 1930s and 1940s: Experiences of Exile in Istanbul and Bombay
No full textThis article follows the hypothesis that the migration movements of artists, architects and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century had a profound and long-term impact on art and architectural production and history. During the first half of the twentieth century artists, architects and intellectuals from Europe sought refuge in global metropolises. As hubs of globalizing modernism these cities were places of entrance, transition and creativity for people fleeing their native countries due to changes in political systems, dictatorships and wars, repression, persecution and violence. In the metropolises new transcultural places of artistic encounter were established. Flight, exile and migration brought artistic and architectural concepts, objects and actors around the world into contact, resulting in transformations that are legible in the topographies and structures of cities, particularly in the ”target“ cities. Their urban topographies contain neighbourhoods, places and spaces that were populated, frequented and run by migrants. In addition to providing the migrants with income, employment and exposure, urban institutions, academies, associations and museums were crucial settings for interaction and exchange between the local and migrant populations. In the following we discuss preliminary findings on the connections between exile, modernism and the urban environment in Istanbul and Bombay (now Mumbai). The essay draws on ongoing research from the European Research Council funded project Relocating Modernism. Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (Metromod).</p
Dispossession by appropriation in a global south city: geography, cartography and statutory regime as mediating factors
No full textSlum and land have a dialectical relationship. A land that is a slum embodies a filthy and dirty territory that hinders the aesthetic competitiveness of a global city. On the other hand, a slum as a land opens opportunities for multiple uses that promise resurrection of world-class ambition. However, in a situation of tight regulation, informal habitations are often could not be forcefully evicted for this dream to come true. In such an event more conciliatory, yet shrewd, practices are adopted to appropriate land from the informally residing community. A number of tools ply to get the work done, among which geography, cartography, and manipulation of statutory laws are more prominent. Taking Kolkata as a case, I wish to situate ongoing appropriation of central urban land as mediated by these three factors. In Kolkata, while forceful evictions take place on informally occupied land both at the fringe and the central part of the city with vague statutory laws, in the tightly regulated central part of the city, appropriation replaces expropriation, accompanied by a more regular invocation of slum in policy and governmental discourses. The study adds to the dispossession literature by underscoring the role of mediating factors in appropriating the central urban land that could not be coercively expropriated, yet needed for claiming a slot in the world-class city register.</p