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Dossier: Architecture in the Foreign Aid-funded Knowledge Economy. 1-Expertise

Introduction

Sebastiaan Loosen, Erik Sigge et Helena Mattsson

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1The decolonization of large parts of the world in the second half of the 20th century drastically altered the ways in which architecture and spatial planning, both as practice and as field of knowledge, were enmeshed in global flows of exchange. In particular the politics and economies of foreign aid shaped these flows of exchange from the 1950s to the late 1980s and gave rise to a whole infrastructure destined to assist the progress of “developing countries” on their “path to development.” Instigated by both the “capitalist West” as well as the “communist East,” the various North-South exchanges that took place in the name of “development” have left a deep imprint on the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Largely instituted through bilateral relations between individual states, these “aid” initiatives involved not only financial and material resources but also various forms of knowledge and expertise; as such, the modalities of this global, foreign aid-funded infrastructure promoted an international network of consultancy and boosted the creation and reinforcement of all sorts of institutional actors to efficiently exchange knowledge—largely through training courses, educational programs and/or research projects. In the light of widespread rural migration, intensive, rapid urbanization processes, as well as the exploration of natural resources and its attendant infrastructures, expertise on the built environment was a particularly salient form of knowledge to the aims of foreign aid. Hence, architecture, urbanism and planning were no strangers to an emerging foreign aid-funded knowledge economy—a context in which the production and circulation of knowledge were as much tied to the political-economic value attributed to them by foreign aid diplomacy as to the long-lasting legacies of centuries of colonialism.

2The contributions in this double theme issue of ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe investigate how architectural knowledge figured in these foreign aid-sourced international relations, and what frameworks were set in place to efficiently exchange that knowledge. While the four contributions in the dossier and debate section of the current issue question the notion of “expertise” in this regard, the thematic contributions to ABE’s next issue will be focusing on the transfer of knowledge through education and pedagogy.

Architecture and Foreign Aid

  • 1 Akira Iriye, Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contem (...)
  • 2 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, N (...)
  • 3 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica. The Untold History of European Integration and Coloniali (...)

3After World War II, the impetus for exploring new forms of international cooperation was more pronounced than ever on the global political arena: the United Nations was established in 1945 on the ruins of the League of Nations to safeguard peace and security; the Bretton Woods institutions laid out the monetary framework for a global playing field of interconnected markets for several decades to follow, and the Council of Europe was founded in 1949 to champion the values of human rights and democracy across the continent’s nations.1 It was soon followed by the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, the trade agreement that, by paving the way for the establishment of the European Economic Community through the Treaty of Rome in 1957, marked the de facto start of a long and piecemeal trajectory to what would become the European Union. The programs and efforts of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF were coloured by optimistic views on the future of development cooperation, but were at the same time permeated by the dominating nations of the Global North and their existing colonial relations to “overseas countries and territories.”2 The Treaty of Rome’s EEC, for instance, was not simply a project for European integration of markets but also sought to maintain and develop its members’ privileged positions in the world, through securing a new order where colonial trade was exchanged for development cooperation.3

  • 4 David Webster, “Development Advisors in a Time of Cold War and Decolonization: The United Nations (...)

4Kindled by the United States’ Marshall Plan for Europe’s recovery in 1948 and to no small extent magnified by the Cold War polarity and the scramble for ideological hegemony in the crumbling colonial empires, the 1950s to the 1980s would become the heyday of “aid” as a powerful flag under which international politics sailed. As more and more former colonies in the Global South embarked on their journey toward independence—a trajectory ridden with conflict, war and mass migration—substantial funds were allocated for “assisting” these newly founded nations on their “path to development.” Thus, under the flags of “foreign aid,” “technical assistance,” “development cooperation” and the like, this new global order of the postwar decades saw praiseworthy humanitarian impulses ambiguously crisscrossed with economic and geopolitical motives in the name of a “great crusade for human progress,” as former director-general of the UN’s Technical Assistance Administration Hugh Keenleyside once put it, and “based upon the assumption that it is possible and practical to transfer knowledge and techniques from one area to another for the purpose of advancing the economic and social development of the people of the world.”4

  • 5 Viviana D’Auria, “Retracing the Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach: Designing in, from and (...)
  • 6 See f.i. Richard Harris, “A Double Irony: The Originality and Influence of John F.C. Turner,” Habi (...)
  • 7 See f.i. Viviana D’Auria, Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon (eds.), Human Settlements. Formulatio (...)

5As epitomized by the UN conferences on the Human Environment (Stockholm 1972) and on Human Settlements (Vancouver 1976, a.k.a. Habitat I), the social, political and environmental aspirations with which architecture was invested in this increasingly global mindset posed renewed challenges to the discipline of architecture.5 The “foreign aid” phenomenon figured in myriad ways in the agenda of architecture through the doings of architects, planners, firms, experts, consultants, and other professional avatars. Historians have taken a wide range of vantage points to chart and critically assess architecture’s role in taking up these challenges. Some of these are centered on key protagonists—with a greater or lesser emphasis on the international networks in which they take part—or on specific projects.6 Others offer autobiographical accounts, an intellectual history of “Human Settlements” as a discipline, thorough analyses from the standpoint of global governance, or a solid account of the state socialist countries’ investments in this endeavor.7

  • 8 For a concise history of such programs, see Sebastiaan Loosen, Viviana d’Auria and Hilde Heynen, “ (...)

6Architecture and planning figured on the agenda of foreign aid not only in the form of actual construction works but also—and increasingly—as one of many fields of “expertise” to be hired and exchanged. Initially, this foreign aid-funded knowledge economy gave rise to a pool of global experts and consultants, such as Jacob Crane, G.A. Atkinson, Ernest Weissman, Charles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger, who roamed the world to offer their expertise to governments in the Global South. They were commissioned by agencies such as the UN Centre for Housing, Building and Planning and remunerated as part of aid packages or engaged through foreign loans. Increasingly however, more emphasis was placed on “local capacity building” rather than directly consumable forms of expertise and consultancy, which led to more structural investments in knowledge exchange, most notably through training and research programs.8 In sum, under the aegis of “aid” and “development,” the postwar political landscape witnessed the rise of a globally entwined infrastructure of knowledge exchange, populated by individual experts and consultants as well as research centers and training programs. The dossiers and interviews in this and the next issue of ABE Journal aim to foreground this infrastructure, its individual actors and institutional nodes, contextualizing, critically analyzing and theorizing their establishment and functioning.

The Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy

  • 9 Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, London: Routledge, 2008 (Postcolonial Polit (...)

7Harry Truman’s famous phrasing of the agenda of foreign aid as “helping people to help themselves,” suggests that at the heart of the development discourse lies an immaterial dimension of knowledge—knowledge of how to achieve “development.” While this dimension plays out on a larger level in, for instance, the many Structural Adjustment Programs that conditioned the access to World Bank loans,9 it also conditions in more fine-grained ways how architectural and planning knowledge was mobilized in this context.

8Our emphasis on this immaterial dimension of knowledge is not to downplay the very material dimensions of architecture’s involvement—through its concrete projects, constructions and infrastructures—nor to simply accept the development discourse and its implicit epistemology as a given. But in the context of a global transfer of resources in the name of development, it is important to stand still at this immaterial dimension and the different roles that are assumed, produced, negotiated, and contested in this exchange. As the interview article between historian and theorist Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and architectural historian Kenny Cupers makes sufficiently clear: there is a need to decolonize the notion of development itself, not in the least in its epistemic dimension and in the ways in which we understand “expertise” on a global level. As an imperative that should be taken to heart by every historian dealing with the subject, this call to probe the epistemic foundations of the notions we rely on as historians should inform not only the analyses we make and conclusions we draw, but also the questions we ask, the sources we consult, and the archives we rely on.

9Thus, the central hypothesis of this double theme issue is that the “foreign aid-funded knowledge economy” is a particularly salient notion to historicize architecture’s entanglement with the politics of development as it draws together a series of disparate phenomena in its global epistemic dimension, from global experts being commissioned to plan new neighborhoods to the devaluation of traditional building crafts to name just two of these interconnected phenomena.

  • 10 Tahl Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation. The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twe (...)
  • 11 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital. A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Edu (...)
  • 12 Maroš Krivý, “Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea,” Architectural (...)

10The notion of a “knowledge economy” refers in the first place to the term as used in historical discussions to highlight a structural economical shift somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, moving from an industrial economy to a more technological and service-oriented economy, sometimes also referred to as a shift from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist mode of production.10 This shift extended the field of economy to include a broad range of human behaviors labeled “human capital” by a group of Chicago school economists and popularized by Nobel Prize laureate Gary S. Becker’s work in the 1990s.11 Though mostly used in reference to capitalist economies in “the West,” the notion of a knowledge economy was also operative in relation to state socialist economies in “the East.” Architectural historian Maroš Krivý, for instance, recounted the history of Etarea, a 1960s utopian planned project in Czechoslovakia of an automated production society, which was explicitly tailored to a new social class of “intelligentsia.” The blue-collar factory worker was to give way to the intelligentsia, an envisioned group of laborers whose work consisted of knowing how to manage and operate certain technological systems, freeing up time for leisure.12

  • 13 Theodore W. Schultz, Investment in Human Capital. The Role of Education and of Research, New York, (...)

11While the notion of a knowledge economy thus has the capacity to crisscross the capitalist and socialist divide in the “Global North” and point to structural features of their societal ordering, its history is also entangled with that of the “Global South.” Its theoretical development in the circles of the Chicago school of economics was significantly impacted by the work of one of Becker’s predecessors, the agricultural economist Theodore W. Schultz, who conceptualized knowledge as a form of capital after studying poor and “undeveloped” families, and who was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize “for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries,” significantly influencing 1980s development policies with his work.13 It shows how much the Global South and the notion of “development” were pivotal in expanding the definition of the economic sector to incorporate human behavior, as used in the context of the “Global North.”

12But the economic notion of a knowledge economy also invokes and at the same time obscures a fundamental relation to its “outside.” As much as societies can shift towards becoming a “knowledge economy,” they are ultimately still reliant on industrial economies: the extraction of ores, the production of steel, the manufacturing of clothes and so on—the only difference being that these activities might have been pushed outside of a country’s national borders. In this sense the concept of a “knowledge economy” signals a restructuring of the wider economic landscape, which to no small degree is tied to the countries of the Global South, the legacies of colonialism and the history of development.

  • 14 Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Von Duncker & Humblot, 1900.
  • 15 Cf. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Prod (...)

13Apart from its economic theoretical meaning, a knowledge economy can, in a second, more philosophical sense, be understood literally as an “economy of knowledge:” a place where something intangible as “knowledge” gains currency and leads to a marketplace for buying and selling knowledge. Here, knowledge is not simply an inevitable component of producing a product, or of designing an architectural project or a regional plan, but gains a value of its own, and as such becomes something that can be brokered and exchanged in a marketplace. Under the banner of “foreign aid,” international diplomacy can be understood to have opened up a marketplace in this sense. And as the German sociologist Georg Simmel illustrated in his Philosophy of Money, more than a neutral framework, the marketplace is in the first place a social construct.14 As in all marketplaces, the marketplace of knowledge assumes certain roles such as those of the “expert” and the “consultant,” who provide “expertise” and whose advice is (literally) valuable. Consequently, that same marketplace also defines what knowledge is considered to be without value, and which is untradeable in this context.15

  • 16 See in this regard, for instance, Aníbal Quijano’s theorization of the “cognitive needs of capital (...)

14In creating a global playing field that aims to make various divergent realities commensurable, the monetary, political and diplomatic value that is attached to knowledge through institutions such as the UN, IMF, EEC, and the World Bank, also has the effect of pinpointing it, fixating the role that knowledge plays in the broader picture of social relations. In parallel to the increasingly more professional organization of such a marketplace over time, the role that knowledge is assumed to play, is in need of being measured and quantified to assess its efficacy, which in turn requires a whole bureaucracy of reporting to assess whether the traded goods created a return on investment.16 In this sense, it becomes crucial to ask: how did knowledge operate in the historical context of a foreign aid-funded knowledge economy?

15Lastly, at the intersection of these two highlighted dimensions—the global restructuring of economies and the social construct that is the marketplace—there is the more prosaic reality that shouldn’t be ignored in the context of this double theme issue: that despite their “foreign” orientation, foreign aid budgets often indirectly served to strengthen the domestic economies of the Global North. Investment in schools and universities, patenting systems, normalizing certain technologies that favor the domestic economy, and so on, were, as will be made evident by some of the contributions, part and parcel of this global exchange and further reproduced the patterns of global inequality.

Architectural Expertise, Aid and Coloniality

  • 17 Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Maspero, 1961 [The Wretched of the Earth, New York, N (...)
  • 18 Camille Robcis elaborates on Fanon and the “disalienation of the mind” in Disalienation. Politics, (...)

16The history of foreign aid and its related knowledge economy is inevitably intertwined with colonial history and the historical processes of decolonization. Through architectural techniques—such as large-scale planning, the layout of buildings, and the organization of interiors—the compartmentalization of land and life created a great divide between the colonized and the colonizer. The separation between the “civilized” and the “primitive” was even more enhanced by the notion of the foreign aid expert, who was supposed to be capable of transferring knowledge to “develop” cultures. As Frantz Fanon has shown, this great divide, the separation of human beings, supported by bare violence and spatial planning, created not only political and social alienation but also psychic alienation.17 Decolonization, therefore, implies a “disalienation” of the mind.18 In this epistemologically alienating perspective, the transfer of knowledge is foregrounded in its full complexity, revealing the contradictory aspects of foreign aid’s proclaimed liberating intentions: how to liberate another human being's mind whilst inevitably relying on a foreign epistemological framework to do so?

  • 19 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border T (...)

17Importantly, we do not argue that the foreign aid project, in all its broad aspects, is a bare failure, but rather that it is a hostage to the history of colonization, making it a double-edged phenomenon. One body of scholarship that is helpful in grappling with this ambivalence inherent to foreign aid is the theoretical framework of “coloniality” as elaborated by a group of mostly Latin American scholars in the early 2000s. Through the works of Walter D. Mignolo, María Lugones, Aníbal Quijano, and Arturo Escobar, amongst others, the term coloniality entered scholarly debates to theorize the long lasting effects of centuries of colonialism as a global condition marked by profound inequalities.19 The post-colonial phenomenon of foreign aid thus plays out on a globally unequal playing ground, shaped by centuries of colonialism and continuing to condition the various exchanges across the globe in myriad ways, from newfangled forms of economic exploitation to race- and gender-based structures of superiority.

  • 20 María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” op. cit. (note 19); Idem, (...)
  • 21 Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Mi (...)
  • 22 For a recent collection of often gender-informed architectural histories of displacement, see Luce (...)
  • 23 Hannah le Roux, “Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Blida, 1956,” ABE (...)
  • 24 Ibid., p. 185.

18Feminist philosopher María Lugones has theorized most strongly how race and gender are not simply analytical categories to historically interpret coloniality, but rather are social constructs whose own history is deeply entangled with the history of coloniality.20 She argues how the condition of coloniality leads to a social classification of the global population along the lines of race and gender, through interiorized senses of inferiority and superiority. Referring to the work of the sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi, who in the 1990s demonstrated how colonialism has imposed gender structures on Yoruba society, Lugones argues how gender politics were co-constitutive of the coloniality of power and thus implores historians to develop an understanding of the social from the cosmologies that inform it, rather than relying on conceptual frameworks alien to the context.21 While gender plays a central role in migration and refugee studies that analyze the gendered experiences of displacement and homemaking, it surfaces remarkably rarely in architectural histories of foreign aid expertise—unfortunately, the current double theme issue is no exception to this.22 It is worth to reflect on this as it has undoubtedly to do with what notions of architectural knowledge or expertise we implicitly find worthwhile to historicize. Architectural historian Hannah le Roux recently pointed in this direction, urging historians to shift the attention away from hegemonic analytical categories such as “comfort” or “climatic design” when describing the history of “tropical modernism,” and actively introduce others such as “care,” which were equally, and perhaps even more, constitutive of the historical experiences we seek to narrate.23 Taking cues from the recent feminist work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Michelle Murphy, and Isabelle Stengers, le Roux asks along these lines: “How do we approach histories of comfort differently, inclusive of their dark content?”24 As “comfort” was a biologically defined notion that rationalized certain ways of constructing the built environment, historians might just as well substitute it by other notions, such as care. How, le Roux suggests, can the history of architecture be rewritten by drawing for instance on the voices of the anonymous Nigerian students whose social surveys tapped indigenous social knowledge and upon which much of the “comfort”-oriented techno-scientific designs were based?

19Along similar lines, we might ask: how do we approach histories of “aid” differently, inclusive of their dark, violent content? In describing a global condition rather than a series of empirically specific actions, the notion of coloniality extends our historical understanding beyond the agency of individuals and acknowledges that even the best of intentions—of architects and other do-gooders—operated within a condition of global inequality. As architectural historians confronting the history of foreign aid, we consider it our main task to start understanding how individuals effectively negotiated this global condition–be it by reinforcing and reproducing it, or rather by resisting, contesting and altering it.

  • 25 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa. Deprovincialization and Decolonization, Londo (...)

20In this double theme issue, we return to a historical period when the knowledge economy and human capital became new territories for neocolonialism and suppression. The collection of essays points to the forces activated by these newly assembled entanglements of the Global South and Global North, and shows how architectural knowledge contributed to and was shaped by these activated power structures. The post-war aid programs, this issue will show, were complex constructions of public and private actors containing contradictory forces carrying both colonial continuations and imaginaries of new futures. Here, we want to examine two archetypes of architectural knowledge—architectural expertise on the one hand, and architectural education and pedagogy on the other—in order to deconstruct their face-value meaning and, perhaps, following le Roux’s suggestion, to start approaching their histories differently. Hopefully, the historical reflections presented in this issue can ask questions back to scholars: How to rethink the theoretical frameworks of architecture, and, to follow Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s suggestion, how to “learn to unlearn in order to relearn?”25 How can we historicize architectural knowledge in a way that is embedded, on the one hand, in the decompartmentalization of land and life and, on the other, in the decolonization of the mind?

This Issue’s Contributions

21The contributions in the first of this double theme issue respond to the specific question of how architectural expertise figured in foreign aid-sourced international relations. Although the examples are different, they all reflect on the historical positions and roles of experts and on what and whose expertise were favored over others. This historical view brings to the fore certain similarities in the infrastructure of the programs or projects that are studied, laying bare international frameworks that were set in place to efficiently exchange knowledge and expertise—be it a university, private consultancy, or a local architect/builder and their relationship with international organizations and institutions. Central to the architectural histories that unfold are the reflections on the epistemological positions of experts and how these positions were legitimized through an aid-funded knowledge economy, but also contested and negotiated both internationally and locally.

22In his contribution on McGill University’s Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG), Lee Stickells maps the material and knowledge flows of the group’s early intellectual investments in economizing housing production in the first half of the 1970s. While the MCHG is mostly known for their stylish DIY-design manuals on sulfur concrete technology or alternative waste disposal systems, Stickells recounts how their agenda was initially marked by an interest in low-cost, self-help housing prototypes targeting an unspecified category of “the global poor,” before it oriented itself more towards an audience closer to home and aimed to rethink consumerist society through low-tech, eco-design experiments in the spirit of the 1960-70s countercultural movements. In tracing this shift in agenda from an ambiguously open-ended “Third World” subject to more unambiguously settling on a clear “First World” orientation of its research activities, Stickells highlights the feedback loops that characterize many of the fledgling research activities in North American and European schools that skirted the “development” sector and tapped into related funding opportunities. By linking the MCHG’s academic knowledge production to Canada’s export industry and the availability of sulfur and asbestos resources, Stickells’ analysis further demonstrates how permeable the partitions between mind and matter are in these regards, showing that architectural expertise in its very articulation is highly interconnected to the global management of material flows.

  • 26 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, NY: Herder & Herder, 1970, [First published as: (...)

23If the early MCHG was targeting a rather general category of “the global poor” from within a “First World” center of expertise, this format of knowledge transfer is pushed to its limit in the remarkable case of the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance (CCSK), the focus of scrutiny in Frederike Lausch’s contribution. This 1980s two-person venture established by Yona Friedman and Eda Schaur and drawing funding by the United Nations University, was targeting an even more universal subject of the global poor in an extensive series of short manuals that sought to rely on a universal pictorial language to communicate its message. Collecting over 200 of these manuals, Lausch discusses how Friedman and Schaur actively question the role of the conventional figure of the “expert” by assuming a role of “meta-expert,” focused on empowering people to activate their own expertise rather than suggesting solutions from a distance. Though their set-up envisioned some degree of local translation and feedback, its predominantly unidirectional communication strategy stood quite at odds with other forms of emancipatory pedagogies of the time such as Paulo Freire’s and Ivan Illich’s.26 In Freire’s understanding, for instance, knowledge production is an inherently collective endeavor, where it is only through the dialogue with others that one autonomously learns, and where knowledge is not a graspable “thing” that can be passed on via a manual. In light of Friedman and Schaur’s conscious struggle with the role of the “expert,” the underdeveloped aspect of this dialogical dimension in the set-up of CCSK’s “self-help manuals” raises the question of the topology of “expertise”—what are the limits of European experts helping people to help themselves?

24Michelle Joan Wilkinson’s contribution further complexifies this topology of “expertise.” Confronting her own family archives and her own memories with the institutionalized Guyanese and British archives, she convincingly argues how our historical understanding and the ways in which we attribute “expertise” to certain actors are actively shaped by the archives we rely on. By reconstructing the professional activities of her grandfather Charles Eric Wilkinson in British Guiana in the late colonial and early post-independence period by means of archives close to home and the affective ties that sustain such archives, Wilkinson sheds light on the machinations of history, which tend to put “foreign experts” in the limelight and “skilled craftsmen” in the shadows, downplaying the intellectual labor and professional organization of the latter in constructing current-day Guyana’s built heritage. In questioning foreign aid and practices of self-help, Wilkinson argues how the influx of “foreign experts,” by codifying expertise in technical journals and trade literature, contributed to displacing the locus of architectural knowledge to the metropole, leaving local expertise as practiced in actual construction, unrecognized and uncredited. In a more general sense, this lack of credit can often be recognized as being reproduced in history-writing in the form of a narrative of colonial dependency, obscuring the reality of interdependence that shaped these practices. Perhaps, Wilkinson’s inquiry suggests, we, historians, are too much guided by established notions of “architects” and “experts”—notions that act more as smokescreens that draw attention away from the more complicated practices of “architecting” and “experting.”

25The already-mentioned conversation article between Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Kenny Cupers takes us even further into the shadowy realm of the conceptual apparatus we rely on when historicizing the foreign aid-funded knowledge economy. In a three-part interview guided by Cupers, Ndlovu-Gatsheni debunks the notion of “expertise” and helps to unpack the consequences for the writing of architectural history. Navigating us through a substantial body of work by theorists of (de-)coloniality and focusing on what some of these theorists have called the “cognitive empire,” Ndlovu-Gatsheni reminds us of how much the history of imperialism is yet to be fully understood in its epistemological sense. He argues how concepts such as “development” and “expertise” are rooted in that cognitive empire, and hence urges historians instead to draw from multiple epistemologies, to delinearize their notions of history and to emphasize human interconnectedness rather than difference.

  • 27 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Justice Against Epistemicide, Boulder, CO (...)
  • 28 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” op. cit. (note 19).

26While we are still far from the “ecologies of knowledge” that some theorists propose as the horizon of decolonizing the “cognitive empire,”27 we believe that the contributions collected here and in ABE’s next issue have the merit of diversifying our understanding of the various paths architectural knowledge has taken in history, maneuvering in between conflicting demands, asymmetrical power relations, a globalizing discourse, stringent financial pragmatism as well as the high hopes of serving a good cause, to name only the most general dimensions, and that, each in their own way, they pierce through the smokescreen of “expertise” and portray a glimpse of the social totality that was the actual production site of architectural knowledge.28

Acknowledgements

This double theme issue is the outcome of a three-day online symposium, organized by the guest editors at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, 8-10 September 2021, titled “Architectural Training and Research in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy, 1950s-1980s.” The organization of this symposium was made possible thanks to the postdoctoral position granted to Sebastiaan Loosen by KTH’s School of Architecture and the Built Environment, and the additional financial support of the Wenner-Gren Foundations. We would like to thank all participants of the symposium for the fruitful discussions, Catharina Gabrielsson and Anders Bergström for helping to shape the event, Viviana d’Auria and Kenny Cupers for helping to secure the quality of the discussions, Rogério Rezende and Hilde Heynen for acting as generous sparring partners in fine-tuning the ideas in this introductory text, ABE’s editors Sarah Melsens, Tania Sengupta, Johan Lagae and Ricardo Agarez for creating the supportive environment in which this collection could grow, and the CNRS for its share in reconceiving the foreign aid-funded knowledge economy by financing this open access journal.

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Notes

1 Akira Iriye, Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

2 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development. From Western Origins to Global Faith [First published as Le développement : histoire d’une croyance occidentale, Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1996 (Références inédites)], London; New York, NY: Zed Books, 2008.

3 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica. The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, London: Bloomsbury, 2014 (Theory for a Global Age).

4 David Webster, “Development Advisors in a Time of Cold War and Decolonization: The United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, 1950-59,” Journal of Global History, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, p. 249-272, p. 260. DOI: 10.1017/S1740022811000258.

5 Viviana D’Auria, “Retracing the Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach: Designing in, from and with Contexts of Development,” in Farhan Karim (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement, New York, NY: Routledge, p. 49-63.

6 See f.i. Richard Harris, “A Double Irony: The Originality and Influence of John F.C. Turner,” Habitat International, vol. 27, no. 2, 2003, Learning from the Past: International Housing Policy since 1945, p. 245-269. DOI: 10.1016/S0197-3975(02)00048-6; Johan Lagae and Kim De Raedt (eds.), ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, no. 4, 2013, Global Experts “Off Radar”; Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design, Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013; Markus Daechsel, Islamabad and the Politics of International Development in Pakistan, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (Studies in International Planning History); Petros Phokaides, “Rural Networks and Planned Communities: Doxiadis Associates’ Plans for Rural Settlements in Post-Independence Zambia,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 23, no. 3, 2018, p. 471-497. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2018.1458044; Nick Axel, Kenny Cupers and Nikolaus Hirsch (eds.), “Coloniality of Infrastructure,” e-flux, 2021. URL: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/. Accessed 13 June 2023.

7 See f.i. Viviana D’Auria, Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon (eds.), Human Settlements. Formulations and (Re)Calibrations, Amsterdam: SUN Academia, 2010 (UFO, 2), in particular the editors’ introduction, “The Nebulous Notion of Human Settlements,” p. 8-27; Christopher Benninger, Letters to a Young Architect, Pune: India House, 2011; Felicity D. Scott, Outlaw Territories. Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency, New York, NY: Zone Books, 2016; Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism. Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020; Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.

8 For a concise history of such programs, see Sebastiaan Loosen, Viviana d’Auria and Hilde Heynen, “‘The City as a Housing Project’: Training for Human Settlements at the Leuven PGCHS in the 1970s-1980s,” in Aggregate, Architecture in Development, op. cit. (note 7), p. 123-140.

9 Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, London: Routledge, 2008 (Postcolonial Politics), ch. 2. The culture of development policy: basic needs, structural adjustment, good governance and human rights.

10 Tahl Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation. The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twentieth-Century Architecture, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011.

11 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital. A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (1975).

12 Maroš Krivý, “Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea,” Architectural Histories, vol. 7, art. 3, 2019, p. 1-17. DOI: 10.5334/ah.314.

13 Theodore W. Schultz, Investment in Human Capital. The Role of Education and of Research, New York, NY: Free Press, 1971; “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1979.” URL: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/schultz/facts/. Accessed 25 February 2023.

14 Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Von Duncker & Humblot, 1900.

15 Cf. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

16 See in this regard, for instance, Aníbal Quijano’s theorization of the “cognitive needs of capitalism,” or, for what regards architecture, Arindam Dutta’s tentative taxonomy of the formal features of architectural knowledge in relation to the temporal imaginaries defined by its economic context: Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder y clasificacion social,” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 6, no. 2, 2000, p. 342-386; Arindam Dutta, “Incompletion: On More Than a Certain Tendency in Postwar Architecture and Planning,” in Aggregate, Architecture in Development, op. cit. (note 7), p. 25-45.

17 Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Maspero, 1961 [The Wretched of the Earth, New York, NY: Grove Press, 1963].

18 Camille Robcis elaborates on Fanon and the “disalienation of the mind” in Disalienation. Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2021 (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning).

19 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000 (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History); Idem, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011 (Latin America Otherwise: Language, Empires, Nations); María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, Winter 2007, p. 186-219. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x. Accessed 13 June 2023; Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3, March-May 2007, p. 168-178. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353; Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program,” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3, March-May 2007, p. 179-210. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162506.

20 María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” op. cit. (note 19); Idem, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4, Fall 2010. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x. Accessed 13 June 2023.

21 Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Minneapolis, MS: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

22 For a recent collection of often gender-informed architectural histories of displacement, see Luce Beeckmans, Alessandra Gola, Ashika Singh and Hilde Heynen (eds.), Making Home(s) in Displacement: Critical Reflections on a Spatial Practice, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022. For an early collection of gender in relation to colonialism in its architectural and urban dimensions, see Karen Tranberg Hansen (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

23 Hannah le Roux, “Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Blida, 1956,” ABE Journal. Architecture Beyond Europe, no. 17, 2020, Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate Zone, p. 181-192. DOI: 10.4000/abe.8197.

24 Ibid., p. 185.

25 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa. Deprovincialization and Decolonization, London: Routledge, 2018, p. 34 (Rethinking Development).

26 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, NY: Herder & Herder, 1970, [First published as: Pedagogía del oprimido, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1968]; Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971 (World Perspectives, 44).

27 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Justice Against Epistemicide, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014; Idem, The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

28 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” op. cit. (note 19).

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Sebastiaan Loosen, Erik Sigge et Helena Mattsson, « Introduction »ABE Journal [En ligne], 21 | 2023, mis en ligne le 07 juillet 2023, consulté le 11 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/14412 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.14412

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Sebastiaan Loosen

Senior Lecturer, ETH Zürich, Switzerland ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5450-8246

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Erik Sigge

Researcher, LTH Lund, Sweden ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2235-1704

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Helena Mattsson

Professor, KTH Stockholm, Sweden ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1437-0876

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