Architexturez South Asia
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If Kahn didn’t spit in the mortar making it magical, IIMA dorms should be reconstructed, not restored
No full textPrimary Materials: Reading Lahore's Disobedient Landscape
No full textThis article explores plants, seeds, soils, and other nonhuman actors as archival and architectural agents within the history of Lahore's urban landscape, as seen from the ground. It traces the halting efforts of the Agri-Horticultural Society of Punjab to enact regional improvement through the development of agricultural and botanical expertise at the advent of British colonial rule in the province, focusing on the materialization of this work in the society's gardens in Lahore. Foregrounding the contingencies of everyday garden making and maintenance, the article posits nonhuman ecologies as a materially diverse and ephemeral architecture and archive of landscape. It argues that, in helping assemble and modulate the society's efforts to model improvement, conduct plant testing, and develop an ornamental garden, plants, seeds, and soils become unlikely and sometimes unruly aesthetic and historical actors, furthering but also unsettling improvement discourse while relocating its historical effects from the region to the city, and providing new readings of the colonial urban landscape.</p
Between fragments and ordering: Engineering water infrastructures in a postcolonial city
No full textThis paper explores the work of engineers amidst the fragments of access and use mechanisms that make up water infrastructures in the city of Chennai in south India. It sets its ethnographic investigation against a dual backdrop. One is that infrastructures in the global south have almost unequivocally come to be accepted as fragmented, even as the fragments themselves are little examined. The second is the mandate and will to order that engineering work is presumed to operate on by academic research and city managers alike. This paper brings these two provocations in juxtaposition by examining engineering work that occurs in the fragments of Chennai’s water infrastructures. In doing so, it argues that engineering modern infrastructures involves multiple, often fragmentary epistemologies that rarely fit into a singular overarching tendency, to order or otherwise. It draws attention to the distinct sub-disciplines as well as the layers of technical jobs and technological cultures constituting the profession of engineering. Tracing the social differentiation between some of these engineering pathways, the paper calls for a rethink of what counts as engineering for the purpose of infrastructure research; and how that shapes our visibility and understanding of cities and their socio-technical support structures.</p
Mediterraneanism in conflict: development and settlement of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants in Gaza and Yamit
No full textThis article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 from the perspective of architectural history. We argue that the prime objective of the Israeli occupation in this decade was economic development, not elimination; its guiding logic saw humanitarian aid as the preferred way to “resolve” the Palestinian refugee crisis. We follow how the pro-development, humanist “know how” of the architects and urban planners wrote themselves onto Gaza’s politics of space. Their scientific approach embodied in Mediterranean architecture was the solution of choice to hit two birds with one stone: end the refugee crisis by assimilating them into the Gaza strip cities, and ensure dependence on Israel by a new development plan with Yamit city at its epicentre. Mediterranean architecture expressed the gradations of vernacularity in the Israeli policy, and helped fashion a unique ideology of development based on exclusion and ethnic separation.</p
In the shade of the chinar: Dushanbe's affective spatialities
No full textThis article evaluates the ongoing reconstruction of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, from the perspective of the affective registers it has elicited: from the despair of those who fondly remember the city's earlier Soviet facade to those who have benefitted from the expansion of housing stock and green space across the city center. Exploring these positions and the role of statist conceptions of modernity, personal and political memories of space, and the emotions called forth by urban redevelopment, the article elaborates on the place of affect and sentimental politics in the processes of city beautification and development. It argues that the despair experienced by city residents in their protests against redevelopment projects has both enabled and constrained citizens in terms of their participation in Dushanbe's urban development, economic redistribution, and the politics of memory.</p
Usable Pasts Forum: UNESCO and Heritage Tourism in Africa
No full textAs an established inter-state organization, UNESCO continues to play an increasingly powerful role in the identification, conservation, and consumption of World Heritage sites across the globe, including Africa. World Heritage sites are designated by UNESCO according to the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage. UNESCO World Heritage sites appear in three major categories—cultural, natural, and a mix of both—all of which are deemed to possess Outstanding Universal Value and, consequently, are unique assets for humankind (Ndoro, 2015a1). Nominated sites must, after deliberations and input from advisory bodies to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meet at least one of the ten criteria (six cultural and four natural) consonant with cultural, historical, scientific, or other forms of significance (Galla, 20122).
As of March 2021, Africa has 145 out of a total of 1,121 sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List (Fig. 1). South Africa (10) currently has the highest number, closely trailed by Ethiopia and Morocco (9), Tunisia (8), and Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania (7). Some African countries have as few as one, while others have none. In contrast, China and Italy have a whopping 55 sites each, followed by Spain (48), Germany (47), France (45), and India (38), among others with numerous declared sites. In response to this disparity, there are genuine calls by African States Parties to the 1972 Convention to increase the number of sites on the continent (Ndoro, 2015a3; di Lernia, this forum).
1. Ndoro, W. (2015a). World heritage sites in Africa: What are the benefits of nomination and inscription? In W. Logan, M. N. Craith, & U. Kockel (Eds.), A companion to heritage studies (pp. 392–409). Wiley.
2. Galla, A. (Ed.) (2012). World heritage: Benefits beyond borders. Cambridge University Press.
3. Ndoro, W. (2015a). World heritage sites in Africa: What are the benefits of nomination and inscription? In W. Logan, M. N. Craith, & U. Kockel (Eds.), A companion to heritage studies (pp. 392–409). Wiley.
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Debating the Swahili: Archaeology Since 1990 and into the Future
No full textThe Swahili are arguably the most studied society in ancient Sub-Saharan Africa. The Swahili are of African in origin but balance their character between continental Africa and influences from the Indian Ocean, including Islam. City-states and towns along the eastern coast of Africa attest that the Swahili built coral monuments and commercial networks with broad connectivity. Colonial archaeologists claimed foreign origins and cast the Swahili as transplants, false representations evident by 1990 through the contributions of African and other archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholarship. Other aspects of the Swahili continue to be debated, and gaps and shortcomings present impediments to resolution. In this article, we characterize the Swahili and note early trends in the region’s archaeology relevant to contextualize Swahili archaeology post-1990. The article then discusses aspects of Swahili archaeology from 1990 to 2015 and current practices. We note trends, substantive achievements, and lapses in substance and practice during 30 years. Finally, we make observations and suggestions to advance archaeology the region’s archaeology. Archaeology in the Global South can learn from the case of the Swahili and the affirmations, critiques, and suggestions offered here, which we intend to promote future archaeological practice in East Africa.</p
Worlding infrastructure in the global South: Philippine experiments and the art of being ‘smart’
No full textThis article explores the material dimensions of ‘smart city’ initiatives in the context of postcolonial cities where urban utilities are qualified as deficient. It argues that while such projects may very well be another manifestation of urban entrepreneurialism, they should not be dismissed as an already-outdated research object. Rather, they can be analysed in light of postcolonial cities’ development agenda. Here, I document and analyse the ongoing construction of New Clark City, a smart city project that is envisioned by the current Philippine state administration as a solution to the crisis that Metro Manila’s urban infrastructure is going through. In doing so, I seek to integrate Science and Technology Studies’ insights on infrastructure provision with the literature on worlding efforts in cities of the global South.</p
Industrial Infrastructure: Translocal Planning for Global Production in Ethiopia and Argentina
No full textCurrent development and re-development of industrial areas cannot be adequately understood without taking into account the organisational structures and logistics of commodity production on a planetary scale. Global production networks contribute not only to the reconfiguration of urban spatial and economic structures in many places, but they also give rise to novel transnational actor constellations, thus reconfiguring planning processes. This article explores such constellations and their urban outcomes by investigating two current cases of industrial development linked with multilateral transport-infrastructure provisioning in Ethiopia and Argentina. In both cases, international partners are involved, in particular with stakeholders based in China playing significant roles. In Mekelle, Ethiopia, we focus on the establishment of a commodity hub through the implementation of new industry parks for global garment production and road and rail connections to international seaports. In the Rosario metropolitan area in Argentina, major cargo rail and port facilities are under development to expand the country’s most important ports for soybean export. By mapping the physical architectures of the industrial and infrastructure complexes and their urban contexts and tracing the translocal actor constellations involved in infrastructure provisioning and operation, we analyse the spatial impacts of the projects as well as the related implications for planning governance. The article contributes to emergent scholarship and theorisations of urban infrastructure and global production networks, as well as policy mobility and the transnational constitution of planning knowledge and practices.</p