Architecture in Development

<p>This extensive text investigates how architects planners and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of “development” after World War II. Development theory did not manifest itself in tracts of economic and political theory alone. It manifested itself in every sphere of expression where economic predicaments might be seen to impinge on cultural factors. Architecture appears in development discourse as a terrain between culture and economics in that practitioners took on the mantle of modernist expression while also acquiring government contracts and immersing themselves in bureaucratic processes. This book considers how for a brief period architects planners structural engineers and various practitioners of the built environment employed themselves in designing all the intimate spheres of life but from a consolidated space of expertise. Seen in these terms development was to cite Arturo Escobar an immense design project itself one that requires radical disassembly and rethinking beyond the umbrella terms of “global modernism” and “colonial modernities” which risk erasing the sinews of conflict encountered in globalizing and modernizing architecture.</p><p>Encompassing countries as diverse as Israel Ghana Greece Belgium France India Mexico the United States Venezuela the Philippines South Korea Sierra Leone Singapore Turkey Cyprus Iraq Zambia and Canada the set of essays in this book cannot be considered exhaustive nor a “field guide” in the traditional sense. Instead it offers theoretical reflections “from the field” based on extensive archival research. This book sets out to examine the arrays of power resources technologies networking and knowledge that cluster around the term development and the manner in which architects and planners negotiated these thickets in their multiple capacities—as knowledge experts as technicians as negotiators and as occasional authorities on settlements space domesticity education health and every other field where arguments for development were made.</p>