• 1 Richard Rottenburg, Far-Fetched Facts. A Parable of Development Aid, Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Pr (...)

3But for many of the related fields, including the design disciplines, the reformulations of development also came with particular labels that covered the shifting terrain between operating contextually and tackling universal issues, a double posture which was at the core of developmentalism. How architects and urban planners became experts capable of “acting globally” therefore, is another process worth probing into to understand the forms of knowledge on which development is based. Anthropologist Richard Rottenburg has illustrated how such knowledge forms relate to representations within an organizational field that self-perpetuates the need for its existence and for more development.1 During the decades that have come under scrutiny in the Architecture/Foreign Aid conference, mega-scale development projects such as dams and the like offered space for constructing many different labels concerning the knowledges required for their implementation. These included self-proclaimed experts as founders of new disciplines, sometimes adopting a language of “experimentation”.

• 2 Mónica Pacheco, “Rehearsing experts and ‘inperts’: crossing transnational housing narratives in W (...)

4Thus, within the United Nations system, as Mónica Pacheco has recently underscored, influence was mainly exercised through the ways in which knowledge production was defined, including its systematization and global dissemination.2 One of the well-known persons who started reflecting on the global trajectory of development practitioners, was a UN expert himself, namely Charles Abrams, who co-authored over 20 reports as a result of partaking in various technical missions. He started working with this idea of having a clear demarcation between what he called “experts” and “inperts”. Already from his early missions to Turkey and Ghana in 1954, Abrams’ emphasis on education was linked to that of forging a novel professional identity, which Pacheco has termed a “superhero” capable of combining multiple skills such as housing design, urban planning, and community development. We have witnessed important accounts of the emergence of this new professional profile, and how particular kinds of expertise entailed particular epistemic hierarchies.

• 3 Burak Erdim, Landed Internationals: Planning Cultures, the Academy, and the Making of the Modern M (...)
• 4 M. Ijlal Muzaffar, The Periphery Within. Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World, Ph (...)

5Burak Erdim, for example, provides a compelling account of the contentious dynamic between “international experts” and “local inperts” used by Abrams when referring to Turkish professionals and bureaucrats.3 This would ultimately enable the formation of another type of expert that Erdim, in connection to the establishment of the Middle East Technical University (METU, Ankara) and Turkey’s brand-new school of architecture and planning, calls “landed international”. Ijlal Muzaffar, in turn, has discussed the “impossible local expert”, not so much as a question of race, but rather as underscoring the necessity that United Nations Technical Assistance Administration (UNTAA) experts should not be associated with any particular national context, since such association allowed the expert’s opinion to be perceived in a political light and diminished his authority related to belonging to an international sphere.4 As such, the expert would lose “perspective and status” and the country would gain “only another civil servant”.

• 5 Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of the Imagination, London: (...)

7Hannah le Roux: There was a biting but probably accurate picture of the development expert painted by Arundhati Roy where she talked about a generic consultant at a time in the 1990s when some 2.5 billion dollars were being earned on overseas contracts by UK consultants.5 In relation to the EIA’s—Environmental Impact Assessments—they wrote, she writes of the “development racket”. In such reports—say for a big dam project—consultants were not allowed to say anything critical because otherwise they became what she calls an “out-of-work consultant”, an OOWC, jeopardizing their Range Rover, holidays in Tuscany, and the children’s private boarding schools. She talked about the good money in poverty and coined the term “fascist maths” to describe how the development experts brought in to justify mega projects enumerated bodies served and discounted those displaced. 

• 6 Viviana d’Auria and Hannah le Roux, “Quand la vie prend le dessus : les interactions entre l’utopi (...)

10Viviana d’Auria: Appropriations have indeed been important to look into. We did so together in 2017, when we discussed the interest of understanding appropriation as an act of subversion against spatial and cultural hegemony which would also manifest itself in material terms.6 We examined the potential meaning of such appropriations in a number of sites, testing the hypothesis that there might be a kind of third term generated by the outcome of an ambivalent interplay between the developmental frame and its contestation. This understanding of appropriation also supports the idea of moving beyond a static image of buildings and what they represented, and understanding how the appropriations enacted through daily inhabitation could act as a counter figure too. While modernism at large was the focus of our past work, this view on appropriation related to insurgencies in the domain of developmentalist initiatives too. What we can read in the appropriations of developmental projects says something about post-development alternatives in that they embody a critique to development and its material manifestations. This contestation should not be set in a reductive action-reaction relationship but rather viewed as an interplay. This would also entail looking at decades-long transformations not just at the scale of buildings, but at the scale of larger sites that can actually show how contestations accumulate. The areas around the Volta Lake in Ghana for example, have completely transfigured the kind of territory that dam-induced development was expected to materialize: the seamlessness of transportation and mobility of goods, the mechanization of agriculture, etc. which actually did not happen as foreseen. Taken together, these appropriations generate a very different interpretation of that territory. But maybe you have something to add on appropriation as well, Hannah?

• 7 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized [first published as Portrait du colonisé, précédé du (...)

17An interesting figure in this regard is Albert Memmi, who expressed sympathy with the project of decolonization but at the same time came to recognize that in his own identity as an Algerian Jew, he could not be Berber or an Arab indigene. His role was different. His classic text on The Colonizer and the Colonized also includes the colonizer who refuses: someone who acknowledges their position as colonizer, but who tries to refuse to perpetuate certain agendas and to rather create solidarity with the locals.7 But Memmi came to the conclusion that this is also an impossible identity: someone will never fully be accepted as a local person. Ultimately the refuser, like the rest of the colonizing community, leaves the colonized country, unable to continue to practice radical empathy or support for that project of decolonization, at least there. This negative identity is another thing that the figures I spoke of had in common. They did not dig in. They did not die in the countries where they practiced. They almost inevitably return home to their birth country, even after decades in the field and despite holding much sympathy and strong friendships with decolonial figures. They did not continue to operate there. Their refusal to remain as experts might be equivalent in architectural practice to Memmi’s characterization of colonizers who refused. Even as their work leant towards solidarity, respect, and transfers in relation to indigenous placemaking, so their awareness of not-belonging became more clear.

• 8 Charles Abrams, Vladimir Bodiansky and Otto H. G. Koenigsberger, Report on housing in the Gold Coa (...)
• 9 KNUST’s history has been recounted by several authors. Of relevance to this conversation are: Bura (...)

18Viviana d’Auria: Well, the building of expertise we discussed earlier did not stop at the planning and transformation of the built environment, but started extending from the field of architecture and planning to how planners, future planners, and architects would be trained. The advisors to planning bodies, became advisors to training institutes as these too were established since the nexus between housing, education, and development was a crucial one. As part of a highly recognizable mechanism of assuming that there was a lack of particular skills in particular sites, which was typical of a developmental standpoint, the shortage of trained or skilled professionals became a major point underscored in the reports that experts like Charles Abrams or Otto Königsberger compiled after their missions as part of the UN technical diplomacy.8 This lack of skilled professionals meant that “development experts” started presenting the need, the necessity, in fact, for setting up architecture and urban planning schools across the world in sites that were rapidly developing and urbanizing so that development could be followed through, and its physical manifestation could gain impetus. It happened with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana, and with the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) in Indonesia between 1958 and 1965, and their respective institutional histories offer glimpses into the complexity of how geo-politics played out in their establishment.9 Individual agencies and non-alignment offered scope for interpreting the content of curricula being set up, especially in the mid-term. The histories of these particular training bodies deserve a kind of nuanced description themselves. Their establishment follows a developmentalist agenda, but they are also sites for contesting or at least re-articulating a particular professional profile. The description of what an architectural project should look like, the materials used, what scales and conventions should be followed, what should be considered heritage or become matters of concern.

• 10 Following the Occasional Reports published by KNUST Faculty throughout the 1960s, which focused on (...)
• 11 Miles Danby, “House Design,” in Robert Chambers (ed.), The Volta Resettlement Experience, London: (...)

19These are real questions that come to the fore in looking at the programs and the curricula set out. The moment of optimism that was part and parcel of early decolonization meant that teaching content—as with other fields—was considered as a transformable and transformative matter. We see how, for the KNUST, documenting the evolution of some of the forced resettlement townships that had been implemented during the 1960s as part of the Volta River Project, sets the scene for a critical re-consideration of vernacular architectures, without essentialism.10 These spontaneous transformations had previously been labeled as “unauthorized structures” by the professionals monitoring the evolution of the new townships.11 Such townships were expected to grow by subscribing to a fixed layout and be built by using modern materials for which micro-loans were made available, revealing both the normative mindset behind the regulatory frameworks governing housing transformation, and their logic as a debt-burdened construction scheme. So at the KNUST, some of the staff involved in teaching started examining what had actually happened at the Volta River Project's first manifestations, they began looking at sites which have not yet been caught in the maelstrom of development, heritage that had been previously neglected, including, for example, the indigenous settlement patterns from northern Ghana, that Labelle Prussin would document (fig. 2).

• 12 John F.C. Turner, “The Reeducation of a Professional,” in John F.C. Turner and Robert Fichter (eds (...)

20The lack of skilled professionals in the so-called “global South” did not only lead to the establishment of new training institutions there. Development cooperation schemes also translated into setting up new programs elsewhere, with a whole set of sites for training professionals being set up in the “North”. Professionals attending such programs would supposedly return to their home countries and become transformative agents of change. There are a number of such programs still present in Europe, of which some were initiated with the patronage of the United Nations. There are only a handful remaining today, such as the Development Planning Unit at University College London (UCL), or the Master of Human Settlements at the KU Leuven. The way they continue to articulate an interdisciplinary approach to the built environment is thought-provoking, and it is of interest to see what kind of changes have been made to their curricula in the course of their five to six decades of existence. There is often an emphasis on on-site training and intensive fieldwork, which comes with a whole set of challenges, ethical questions, and interrogations about participants’ positionality. In Leuven for example, fieldwork is viewed as a way to generate trans-local expertise, where a contextual approach is possible together with a critical understanding of the global picture. Does it become any easier for attendees of such programs to become aid hackers? Does it facilitate their professional re-articulation? This process does recall the insistence of John Turner on the importance of self-determination, which also touched upon what he termed his own “re-education” as a professional after experiencing post-earthquake reconstruction in Peru.12 

• 13 Martha L.P. Rodriguez, “El Programa CINVA y la accion comunal,” Bitācora, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008, p. (...)

21Hannah le Roux: The post-Independence period was one of increasing work mobility as well as people moving to teach within a network of new schools, either temporarily, as in the workshops that Julian Beinart and Ulli Beier set up, but also through post-graduate education opportunities mentioned earlier and the CINVA (Inter-American Housing and Planning Center) in South America.13 The re-formation of people who were trained initially as architects in a conventional sense is interesting. Self-re-education happened in their movement to another center of expertise.

• 14 Amancio d'Alpoim Guedes in John Donat (ed.), World Architecture Today. New York, NY: Viking Press, (...)

23In another case, Pancho Guedes trained as an architect in Johannesburg and returned to Mozambique, which became his adopted homeland. He worked closely with visual artists and craftsmen because he felt that their kind of unselfconscious mode of design was something that could guide him in his own attempts to self-educate. He also became a strong documentary worker. His photographs of adaptations at street level of the very basic houses explore other forms of expression.14 These projects use a couple of modalities: one is the visual study, but he also considered how people physically made things. The latter fed into the language of his so-called “clandestine style” of thatch, reeds, and wooden poles. Designing buildings in this way blended them into their surroundings not only aesthetically, but also allowed non-government organizations to place buildings into areas of the city where people were living without proper facilities. They could then carry out education projects that were not controlled by the colonial powers. This kind of clandestine work was one genre of hacking. 

• 15 Labelle Prussin, African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place and Gender, Washington DC: Smithsonian (...)
• 16 Hannah le Roux, “Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and Nigeria,” Architectural History, v (...)

24Another figure is Labelle Prussin, who we mentioned earlier. She went to Berkeley and was a well-trained architect. She got a position with an international contractor in Ghana but following a car accident, she managed to extract herself from it, to send her daughters to boarding school, and to become a teacher at KNUST and a researcher in Northern Ghana. She started to engage with courtyard architectures and very importantly, female nomadic architectural practices.15 Alan Vaughan-Richards initially came to Lagos as an employee of the Architects Co-Partnership, but at the time of decolonization married Ayo Vaughan, a Lagosian woman whose family gifted them a piece of land in Ikoyi. He began making connections with local designers and artists through patronage, although with limited resources. He used wood as the cladding for circular forms, while pursuing other technological experiments with organic concrete sections.16 Both Prussin and Vaughan-Richards were people whose trajectory was economically not very successful, but one that allowed them to contribute significant alternative perspectives to bigger development projects.

• 17 Kim De Raedt, “Between ‘True Believers’ and Operational Experts: UNESCO Architects and School Buil (...)

25Hannah le Roux: The fourth discussion is around ways to construct histories that create a more nuanced approach to understand development aid and the segue from the colonial to the post-colonial moment. Biography can work as a method to retrieve lost possibilities for de-colonial strategy. In preparing the talk, I scoured the lives and practices of some individuals for evidence of early activism. In doubly foreign ways, they independently found ways—sometimes exploiting, and sometimes relinquishing the privilege of their foreignness—to connect below the radar screen towards diverse, non-sanctioned ends. In the handful of stories, the ambivalent potentials of minimalism, the practice of care, and the double face of appropriation became tools for the counter production of space. These narratives moved beyond the binary of “true believers” and “operational experts” in development projects, and leant on Saskia Sassen’s belief that frontier sites can be hacked by the powerless in the process of making.17

• 18 Tom Avermaete and Cathelijne Nuijsink, “Architectural Contact Zones: Another Way to Write Global H (...)
• 19 Meeting minutes of the Volta River Project Working Group “C” are particularly revealing in this re (...)
• 20 Hannah le Roux, “Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Blida, 1956,” ABE (...)

28Viviana d’Auria: A second method we have been talking about deals with what scholars have termed “cross-cultural contact zones” and that within architecture, comprise materials that have been neglected to date.18 These architectural contact zones were substantially present in the world of development aid, and included proceedings, journals, reports, minutes of meetings, summer schools, competitions and so forth. As has been pointed out, this array of materials offers a conception of architectural development that is based on a more global and multidirectional exchange of knowledge. Moreover, these materials can also reveal internal debates or contentions around certain questions that are bypassed when the emphasis remains on the material outcome of a certain decision-making process. One telling example is presented by discussions around housing standards in the context of the Volta River Project, debated at various meetings between colonial and post-colonial government officials and representatives of aluminum companies at the intersection of comfort, economics and dwelling cultures.19 We do not know enough about this kind of history of decision-making in the lead up of certain projects. Relatedly, we must also be attentive to the systematic removal of particular voices in final reports which contact zones can on the other hand make more obvious. I am thinking here of the indigenous researchers from the Ahmadu Bello University who supported Max Lock in his urban planning tasks and how they were anonymized, but whose involvement you referred to.20 As part of these contact zones we can include the curricular propositions, revisions and reforms concerning the teaching content at some of the institutions we have mentioned earlier, where development aid professionals were and in some cases still are being trained.

• 21 Hannah le Roux, “CINVA to Siyabuswa: the Unruly Path of Global Self-Help Housing,” in Vikramaditya (...)
• 22 Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, Chicago, IL: University of (...)

30Another insight concerns the narratives of failure. Earlier, I mentioned Jorge Luis Arrigone, who was trying to insert a liberal self-help scheme into the South African apartheid housing policy, in what was in effect a bizarre situation. Ultimately, he only succeeded in building a pilot scheme of less than 50 houses.21 Narratives of failure are important because there are many such projects that are unfinished, and which are often the sort of object of ridicule and proof of the failure of development aid. However, they are still very interesting for our architectural histories and we do not abandon them because they were not significant in scale, just like Balkrishna Doshi’s Belapur housing scheme. Their impact was outsized in relation to their scale, the physical scale. The other famous narrative of failure is a story of New Gourna, where Hassan Fathy reported a very early accusation of vested interests in cement as a building material by officials responsible for specifying low-cost housing.22 His text gives us an idea of the distant impact of certain materials, companies, service providers, financiers and so on, on what could actually be built. Narratives of failure, therefore, are not the end of stories, but the beginnings of other stories that we need to tell.

• 23 “From Mzamba to Mzamba Bridge,” 2015. URL: https://buildcollective.net/onsite/from-bridgingmzamba- (...)

31In relation to that, I spoke a bit about scale through the complex story of a bridge at Mzamba in South Africa designed and built by a small non-profit team, buildCollective, led by the Austrian architect Marlene Wagner in 2015 (fig. 3). A community in rural Pondoland had asked for a bridge so they could cross the river between their tribal land and a casino resort that was built at the end of apartheid and where a lot of their people worked. There was a school on the casino side, but not where the community resides. Children had to cross the river—which had slippery rocks—to and from school daily, and pensioners did the same to get their monthly grant handouts.23

• 24 “Msikaba and Mtentu Bridges. Danish bridge expertise exported to South Africa,” Dissing and Weitli (...)

32But there was a coincidence in time between the building of this bridge and the awarding of a contract for a mega bridge project, part of the South African National Roads Agency’s plans—first mooted in the apartheid era—to create a major toll road parallel to the coast. The Mtentu bridge, spanning another divisive coastal river, was designed by the Danish firm Dissing+Weitling in 2007 and lauded as the longest such bridge in Africa—such metrics are always cited.24 A building contract (around 100 million euros) was awarded to a partnership of South African and Austrian engineering firms who then exited in the face of community and environmental protests against it, as well as the road itself. It is now being completed by a Chinese contractor with South African engineering consultants.

• 25 Chimandanda Ngozi Adichi, The Danger of a Single Story, TED, 2009. URL: https://www.ted.com/talks/ (...)
• 26 Sammy Baloji, Silvia Francescini, Nikolaus Hirsch and Estelle Lecaille, Exhibition Catalogue (Brus (...)

36Hannah le Roux: There is more research needed. It takes more time to locate particular kinds of media or to start tracking the mobility of certain agents of transformation. It seems that the more one looks, the more there seems to be a multitude of practices at play. I think this richness of sources may not quite be a call for optimism—resources being short for its research—but at least a call to continue to work to push back the kind of hegemonic interpretation of history which connects definitions of development. Once these multiple micro-histories accumulate, we could start seeing them as a field in itself that is quite powerful in a certain sense. At least, using Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s term, they provide evidence to challenge the power of a single story.25 An important strategy that we can see in recent exhibitions—and we had our discussion soon after viewing Style Congo. Heritage & Heresy at C.I.II.III.IV.A-CIVA—is to return to colonial archives using much more critical voices.26 The curators used the work of visual artists who, although obviously constrained within their own conditions, are passionately defiant against so-called colonial gifts. We recall then how many of these figures in my collection of hacking stories were themselves either patronizing artists or inspired by artists. When you talk about a resistant field of micro-practices, the world of art, as both practice and its proximity to contemporary critical theories gives us a model from which to canonize this field of study. We would then have people to look back on and to applaud for pioneering work in attempting to break down patronizing foreign supremacy in favor of multiple small acts of resistance that ultimately could underscore the edifice of development.