Against Colonial Architectural Logic at JBSC Conference
21st November 2024 | Jaap Bakema Study Centre Conference, Rotterdam, Netherlands | Conference Panel
Against Colonial Architectural Logic: Reading "Unformalisation" from Archives of Formalisation
The 11th edition of the annual conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre (JBSC) seeks to unravel the entanglements between modernity, coloniality and architecture, in the context of the construction of welfare states, open societies and global production systems.
Paper Abstract
Modernity and modernism on the African continent and beyond were deployed alongside processes of colonial regulation, disciplining and ordering – formalisation. Thus, colonial architectural archives have tended to be read by architectural scholars as archives of formalisation and formal architectural production. Consequently, prevailing approaches to studying architecture in Africa have typically revolved around dichotomies of formality and informality, with buildings analysed either as ‘formal’ grand edifices built by licensed architects and regulated by state authorities, or as informal haphazard and aberrant products of poverty and state failure (Elleh, 2014; Hansen & Vaa, 2004). Given this, most of the African continent’s built environment is generally categorised as ‘informal’ (e.g. Hansen & Vaa, 2004; Zerbo et al., 2020).
But what is generalised as informal architecture and urbanism includes not just marginal constructions such as ‘slums’, ‘kiosks’, and ‘shacks’ but also a vast assortment of carefully constructed and capital-intensive buildings created outside the purview of professional institutions and governments such as shopping complexes, factories, and mansions. Indeed, I contend that this latter group makes up a significant proportion of this informal category and, thus, a substantial portion of the African built environment. Focusing on the case of present-day Ghana, in this essay, I show how a significant proportion of the African built environment has been misunderstood in academic research and overlooked as ‘informal’, distorting research and policies around architecture and urbanism on the continent.
Since January 2019, I have led a project which has digitised over 30,000 primary archival documents pertaining to architecture and urban governance in Accra when Ghana was a British Crown Colony known as The Gold Coast. Dating from 1904 to 1947, these documents, mainly building permit applications and Accra Town Council records, are among the earliest documentary records of indigenous construction and contact with colonial city planning authorities. They provide some of the richest sources about the formalisation of architecture in the then-Gold Coast. In using this archive as a source, I have sought not to approach it as it was created – as a record of modernisation, formalisation, and formal/modern architectures – but rather as a what I term unformalisation. I conceptualise unformalisation as processes of diminishing, erasing, and excluding indigenous African architectural and urban forms. In so doing, I propose a new epistemological approach through which scholars of architectural history might reconfigure thinking around dichotomies of formality and informality in modern and modernist built environments, towards a fundamental shift in how architecture on the continent is studied, conceptualised, and categorised.
Session VIII: Archiving Ethics, moderated by Dirk van den Heuvel. Panelists: Irina Davidovici and Sabine Straüli (gta Archive, ETH Zürich); Abdullah Ogunsetan (Omi Collective, University of Lagos); Kuukuwa Manful (Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan); Hannah le Roux (Sheffield University) and Nokubekezela Mchunu (Independent Scholar)
Conference Chairs: Dirk van den Heuvel, Alejandro Campos Uribe, Stef Dingen
