1Starting with the previous issue, this double theme issue of ABE Journal. Architecture Beyond Europe aims to shed light on how the politics and economies of foreign aid shaped the global flows of exchange of architectural knowledge. As the agendas of architecture and foreign aid substantially overlapped from the 1950s to the late 1980s, it gave rise to a global knowledge economy in which the exchange of architectural knowledge was promoted and governed by an international network of consultancy and the creation and reinforcement of all sorts of institutional actors such as research centers and architecture schools. The dossiers and interviews in this and the previous issue of ABE Journal aim to foreground this infrastructure of knowledge exchange, its individual actors and institutional nodes, contextualizing, critically analyzing, and theorizing their establishment and functioning.

2While the thematic contributions to the previous issue questioned the notion of “expertise,” the contributions to the current issue focus on the role of education and pedagogy to further qualify the specificities of this foreign aid-funded knowledge economy.

Architecture Education and Foreign Aid

5Through these and other initiatives, the foreign aid-funded knowledge economy gave rise to an institutional landscape with a global reach that straddled various spectra: from a training and educational focus to a research orientation, from a focus on architecture to one on planning, from being initiated by the capitalist West to the socialist East or the Non-Aligned Countries, and from having its base in the Global North and offering South-oriented programs to knowledge centers located in the Global South.

6With its roots in the late colonial era, this heterogeneous landscape of global training, mobilizing architectural expertise with the purpose of catering to the development context, had become a widespread global phenomenon by the 1970s. It ranged from early initiatives in London (the AA’s Department of Tropical Studies) and Rotterdam (the Institute for Housing Studies, IHS) in the 1950s to Ford Foundation-sponsored programs at MIT and Harvard in the US in the 1960s; from the Post Graduate Centre Human Settlements in Leuven, Belgium of the 1970s to the Committee on Habitat and Development Studies in Lund, Sweden in 1979; from the Centre for Architectural Research and Development Overseas in Newcastle, UK (1972) to the Centre for Human Settlements at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (1976); from the Postgraduate Course in Urban and Regional Planning for Developing Countries in Szczecin, Poland (1965) to the Housing Research and Development Unit in Nairobi, Kenya (1967); and from the Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1954) to the Norwegian-funded National Housing and Building Research Unit in Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania (1971)—to name just a handful. As the development impetus grew, centers, institutes and programs were established at architecture and planning schools in the North, South, East and West to assist architecture’s contribution to development—each with their own particular approach to the issue.

This Issue’s Contributions

8In her contribution on her own, former institute, the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, Pakistan, Sarah K. Cheema recounts the short transitional period that turned it from a colonial craft school into a modern institution geared towards the newly independent state’s agenda of economic development. Firmly within the sphere of US influence and with the departure of much of the school’s staff following the partition of India, foreign experts such as Mark Sponenburgh had a big impact on this transition and on the structure and pedagogy of the institution. In foregrounding a series of ambivalences of an architectural curriculum caught between being instrumentalized to serve national development goals and defending a fine art oriented pedagogy, between adhering to the principles of modern design and upholding the value the pedigreed crafts, and between stated pedagogical goals and their actual curricular implementation, Cheema complexifies the institute’s history and fleshes out the maneuvering space it had vis-à-vis both the government’s agenda as well as foreign experts’ intentions. In what is much more than an afterword, Cheema reads this transitional period as a prelude to the actual process of decolonization, offering a nuanced and layered account of the many fronts on which decolonization of architecture education plays out. This entails not only revising the curriculum, but also the disclosing of archives, the active reinterpretation of its own history, and the dismantling of relations of power and conceptions of knowledge, to name only a few of the fronts highlighted by the author.

9In contrast to the focus on the short, transitional period of a single institute, Mark Olweny’s contribution outlines the longer and interrelated histories of architecture education in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, crossing current-day borders and historically opposing ideological leanings. Covering wide-ranging topics, through this more macro perspective Olweny sheds light on the political economy of architecture education in the region, detailing its links to the colonial and post-colonial state, to geopolitics, and to the logics of foreign funding. Through a series of dual case studies with different funding logics, Olweny traces the impact of this political economy on architectural practice and on the formal language of architectural design. The long history presented captures particularly well some of the challenges architecture education faced in the early independence period: a shortage of training capacity, the necessity to maneuver between the two Cold War fronts—with a notable attempt to bridge this divide in the form of the interterritorial University of East Africa (1963-1970)—facing nationalist agendas and drives to “Africanization”, and new elite formations that increasingly weighed on the agenda of education. While architecture curricula in East Africa still bear the traces of this long history today, Olweny ends by pointing to a couple of recent initiatives that provide alternative models of conceiving the architecture profession and architecture education.

10Lastly, the conversation article between Hannah le Roux and Viviana d’Auria brings us back from the specific context of architecture education to an in-depth discussion on the modalities of history-writing in the context of foreign aid. Through a series of figures and counter-figures, le Roux and d’Auria dissect the nature of historiography and strategize about the options on the table for historians. Rather than taking the figure of the foreign aid expert for granted, they wonder about those who appropriate, contest or even hack the logics of foreign aid. Rather than reiterating the perverse logic of payback that characterizes much of foreign aid expenditure, they wonder about those who push back against it. Rather than limiting oneself to formal architecture education, they wonder about the processes of re-education inherent to being active in the context of foreign aid. And against the hegemonic narrative of architecture history and development, they present a picture of history-writing as an accumulation of multiple micro-histories that defy this hegemonic interpretation, offering a series of hands-on examples of historiographic strategies and alternative sources for us to build on in future work.