Review: Blueprint for Decolonisation Symposium

Blueprint for Decolonisation was hosted by Karl Mok, from the Asian Architects Association, with Dr Kamna Patel, Ming Cheng, Sanaa Shaikh, Khensani de Klerk, and Shumi Bose making up the discussion panel.

We kickstarted the symposium with Dr Kamna Patel's Race & Space: Project to De-Censor the Theorising of Space at the Bartlett. Dr Patel is the Bartlett School's Vice-Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and is Associate Professor of the Development Planning Unit. She and her colleagues created Race & Space with a view to create a new curriculum for un-learning, by posing questions that challenge the status quo in academia and in the built environment.

Space is the one common concept to all aspects of the built environment - Dr Patel argues that we produce the social and material geographies that directly shape who lives where, and how prosperous they can be, and this impacts job security, food access, quality of education, and many other aspects of our daily lives. Therefore, we cannot answer just how space works without addressing racism and racial ordering. Take for example district divisions in the provision of council funding or voter power, or on a more physical level, street names and ornamentations.

Dr Patel describes this as the "colouring of space" - where race is either directly or indirectly implicated in cultural symbols, dominant groups vs minority groups. London is the heart of the former British Empire, and this is echoed in its streets: institutions built on Empire money, memorials to past oppressors and oppressions, and discussing the impacts of these memorials brings up clashes with heritage and conservation - how do we preserve our culture if said culture was oppressive to so many others around the world, all of which still bear that mark?

Dr Patel et al.'s curriculum was published in 2020 and handed out to every single member of staff in the Bartlett. Students can freely access & download the curriculum here: 'Race' and Space: A New Curriculum). Change can take a while, but it is imperative that students can use and learn from it.

Our second project was a student project from the REDD Collective (Reclaim Empower Disrupt Design Collective), a 7-person student collective based at the London School of Architecture and tutored by Ming Cheng. REDD Collective places strong emphasis on the urban scale, focusing on social, economic and political issues from the street up, using intersectional collaboration to build a new cultural infrastructure with lost histories and existing community groups.

Reclaiming Colonial Losses Aaran Sian (REDD Collective)

Two students from the REDD Collective, Aarandeep Sian and Aissa Diallo, walked us through their Hacking Hackney intervention, an exploration into reclaiming the streets of Hackney in London based on alternative land ownership.

They mapped racial injustices across Hackney across space and time - including and not limited to cultural erasure, evictions and murder; then mapped retaliations to these: collectives, charities & intersectional grassroots campaigns. These groups work to combat a lack of visibility and to provide safe spaces and justice, but are often also economically vulnerable and get evicted from their premises.

Based on their mapping, Hacking Hackney's core aim was to create common spaces run by and for the community, building intergenerational spaces and connection, reflecting the individual needs of each community group that the collective focused on.

One of these spaces was The Exploded Museum - which aimed to reappropriate artefacts to communicate a more truthful historical account of spaces. This alternative museum concept utilised 3 types of interventions: uncovering hidden stories (for example, the history of Ayahs coming from India and being abandoned by their host families), reclaiming statues to create learning spaces and an archive collection travelling around the streets.

Another intervention by REDD Collective was a QTIBIPOC (Queer, Transgender and Intersex People of Colour) Network. This network sought to find and re-appropriate spaces around Hackney for pop-up spaces, make-spaces and support networks, first digitally and then a physical manifestation of space.

Dallo and Sian said how natural the way the team came together was, even despite having to work separately from each other when working as a collective. Everything was hard as it was over Zoom, but it was easy working together as people.

Our 3rd presentation came to us from Sanaa Shaikh, lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, who explored the colonialisation of urban space.

Colonialisation refers to the actions of settling among, exploiting and establishing control over indigenous people of the area. How can this relate to the built environment?

In her presentation, Sanaa Shaikh linked gentrification directly to colonialisation. Take, for example: An influx of chains and services taking over from local services, so that a street once filled with independent shops, ethnic food outlets, and cafes, is pushed out to become shopfront-after-shopfront of samey coffeeshops, the same as the next district over.

Or - existing buildings appropriated for workspaces to be sold and rented out for financial gain rather than a more appropriate use which is affordable for the existing community.

Or - changing the makeup of an area by pushing people out, hiking up rental prices, displacing tenants to make way for a "trendier" demographic. These examples could apply to hundreds of communities up and down the country, and all around the world.

What effects can this have on people?

The most familiar and wide-reaching affect is on the physical environment. Undefined holistic borders that have formed naturally over time are erased for external forces to draw out borders defining places per outside interest. The straight lines of many African countries' borders were created by ruler and pencil, and in the urban context the developers are the colonisers - dictating boundaries and isolation, colonising specific urban areas for their resources without regard to the rest of the area.

The socio-political effects run directly on from this. Community segregation, "Divide and Conquer"... Our social hierarchy is still centred around race and class, with aspirations around the world to mimic colonised cultural practices (for example, skin lightening, hair styles), and urban context erasing culturally specific foods, ceremonies, and markets to cater to new "desireable" demographics.

Coloniality refers to the long-standing patterns of power which emerge as a result of colonialism. These patterns are retained in cultural patterns, self-image, aspirations, knowledge and access - we breathe in coloniality every day. In most modern post-colonial societies, this legacy of colonialism is still prevalent in our social hierarchies, prescribing values and castes which persist as descrimination to this day. As a consequence, we are creating and reaffirming these existing hierarchies, so the decisions made favour those in power and not the majority of our society.

In terms of knowledge production and distribution, the world follows a distinctly Euro-centric model - of the best universities in the world, the whole continent of Asia only has 3 in the top 50. Neither Africa nor South America have any institutions in the top 100. On their own, these statistics suggest that the quality of teaching across these three entire continents is far lower than that of Europe and North America, but when the production of knowledge is so focused on those who have always been in power, how is this a fair representation of higher education worldwide?

This narrative is reinforced by consistent reproduction within these same systems. These statistics also reflect the systematic destruction of indigenous knowledge bases - and any knowledge which does not mesh with the perpetrators' knowledge system. Anything designed or created from a non-Euro lens is regarded as inferior, and the fusion of knowledge is not accepted. This systematic erasure of indigenous knowledge is known as Epistemicide.

Before this symposium, I’d not considered the now-obvious connection between gentrification and colonialism, for example - the pushing out of existing communities, services, and history to make space for outsiders’ financial gain. It’s vitally important that we look at not just the visual and surface-level social aspects of making space, but its communities, its politics, its economic impact.

For more on the decolonising of space, look out for DECOSM as part of the MATRIX Exhibition at the Barbican, May 2021, pushing the process of decolonisation.

Matri-Archi(tecture) is geared towards African women in architecture through spatial education

Part Four came from Khensani de Klerk, lecturer at Cambridge university and founder & co-director of Matri-Archi(tecture). Matri-Archi is building a constellation of the richness of initiatives and collectives: with the Now as a constant conversation.

Khensani de Klerk took us on a whirlwind tour of decolonising knowledge, glitch feminism, collectivising, and the fluctuating blueprint of culture and architectural identity.

Collectivising as an act creates a mechanism for sharing that allows spatial practicioners (architects, artists, academics...) to journey together in self-awareness and increase our consciousness of the world.

De Klerk praised the student movements that are coming out of architectural institutions, such as BLM_Arch at Manchester School of Architecture, and Architits at Oxford Brookes University. Students, she says, are ephemeral but those in the institution are of the institution - which means that their ideas do bleed into the ideas of the institution. Academia is generally miles ahead of the curve in practice, and this discourse needs to take on a new form - technology, localities, climate, broader perspectives as seen from a younger generation. Students and academia have the space to look at this with a very open eye whereas practices might not have the time or resources to do so.

"In this expansive and more inclusive understanding of architecture, the vernacular is as relevant as any other form of architectural practice." - de Klerk, 2021

The knowledge that we gain in education should teach us how to critically engage in our ever-diversifying world. We are trying to better the institution through collectivising rather than through capitalist schools of thought which push for a "give and take" attitude. One collective pushing for this is Under Pressure Sundays, which records and archives oral transmission. This prioritising of indigenous knowledge production shifts the focus back towards ethnic language and forms of knowledge, which were suppressed when colonisers took over the land and imposed their own rules. Western forms of knowledge transmission still ignore and downgrade indigenous forms of language and knowledge such as oral history, using rhythm, and the physical process of making.

De Klerk also discussed the difference between Decolonisation as a passive phase, versus Decolonising as an act, an unending process fuelled by discussion and action. She also asked - who is obligated to do this work? Why is this work put on the shoulders of the oppressed, and who is listening?

Individuals are scared to talk about their experiences and the work that still needs doing because they are hyper-aware that they can be replaced. Coalitions and collectives give a way to provide safety in numbers and a broader platform for discussion and for change.

Finally, we heard from Shumi Bose, architectural historian, curator and teacher at Central St Martins. Her first comment was that she's not tired of this discussion, but she's tired of the situations in the world that necessitate it.

As a historian, Bose looks back to learn how we can look forward. Last year she found herself re-watching "Handsworth Songs" (1986), after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, because she hadn't seen that demonstration of coalition between Black and Asian people in living memory. It's a demonstration of what can be done when we come together. Certain events become flashpoints. 8 people shot in Atlanta making the headlines rather than the hundreds of violences against Asian people; George Floyd becoming a figurehead for police brutality against Black people; in the wake of these events, at least in America there is acknowledgement of this violence, and discussion, and solidarity from many different groups behind one single movement.

"Handsworth Songs", created by Black Audio Film Collective is a film essay that looks at Birmingham and London and the effects that the 1985 Handsworth Riots had on the local people in the area. "There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories."

Bose says she is "psychologically undone" by the dissolution of coalition. As someone growing up between Britain and India, all Bose wanted was to resist alienation and to believe in cultural coaliton. While growing up, she didn't see the need for recognition, but recognition nowadays is something that people want in society all around the world. However, Bose is more interested in systemic changes - who is writing the books on this?

"I need to believe that when I am unable to fight, somebody else will fight for me. And when somebody else cannot fight, that I will be able to fight for them." - Bose, 2021

She also touched upon the problem of internal discrimination - an issue that every person of any minority faction understands, internal discrimination is alienation through the divide and conquer approach. This internal discrimination is most visible through "model minorities" - Asian women, for example, are seen as the A1 minority hire as society stereotypes them as smart but meek, diligent but subservient. Model minorities serve only to divide already fractured society into inward-looking groups, tearing their focus away from dismantling the very system that fractures them all in the first place.

Something that really struck me about this discussion was how wide reaching the topics are. We've discussed so much, and the raw honesty has been both hard-hitting and inspiring.

I come from a mixed ethnicity British-Indian family and only now in my 20s am I learning about the need for these discussions, on the pressure for POC to take on roles as advocates because they cannot tell their stories otherwise. It's difficult to work together when people speak over each other in trying to speak for each other. Coalition and intersectionality is therefore an active, ongoing learning process, which we can all stand to learn from and participate in.

Often activists and academics take the dismantle and rebuild approach to systematic reform; how can this approach be applied practically in academic institutions?

Dr Kamna Patel, Vice-Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the Bartlett replied: there are multiple levers in any institution to change and affect these structures, but to properly incite change, one needs to pull all the levers at the same time.

The Bartlett has started a scholarship scheme for under-represented groups in the built environment, which applies to all levels from Undergraduate through to PhD; further afield, Glasgow University has partnered with the University of the West Indies. Decolonisation as an abstract doesn't work, said Dr Patel, it needs to be specific. It needs to mean something to the institution rather than being performative.

So, what solutions can we propose to work together? Taking the Hacking Hackney project as an example, why can't we emulate this all over the world?

The REDD Collective has already started discussing projects further afield - although their initial project was rooted in Hackney they expressed a desire to engage with new communities and adapt it to new spaces.

How important then, is intersectionality in this context? And how can a project like Hacking Hackney be transported to new communities?

In a larger practice, there are numerous barriers in our way - as much as we (the architectural workers) would like to work along the decolonisation agenda, there are clients' wishes to be considered first and foremost, but discussions like the Blueprint for Decolonisation are incredibly important to have and to learn from.

There is currently a huge discord between academia and workplace frameworks, as academia is seen as more free to explore these discussions. so, how can we meet in the middle? 

Part of the issue of decolonisation is that we need more students from diverse backgrounds entering into architecture, but there is currently very little representation at the top, and very little upwards movement. This gets highlighted by the architectural press, with subsequent statements put out by so many practices, but these are more often than not just empty statements - these practices normally showcase the diversity of their Part 1's, Part 2's and recent graduates, but their boardrooms are still predominantly white.

When we're encouraging young people just starting their career journey they need representation at the top - this goes for women, minority ethnic groups.

One of the viewers commented "It's like a glass ceiling... you come out of university, and you wonder what's happened to the rest of your cohort. Dare I call it a white ceiling?"

Perhaps the most pertinent question asked was: To what extent did the speakers choose to ask these questions, or was it more "well, nobody else is asking them, and somebody needs to"?

This question identified a very real issue in the discussion of intersectionality and decolonisation - Dr Patel has taken a giant leap into this, which is very much driven from the "if not me, then who?" school of thought, which comes with high visibility, high expectation and a lot resting on her work. There aren't many people from the same background as Dr Patel in her faculty.

Neither Dr Kamna Patel nor Ming Cheng actively started their careers to tackle these questions, but the younger generation is taking this by the reins as a starting point. The younger generation is impatient for change. And the more we wait, the more impatient the next generation becomes.

How can we acknowledge the intersectionality of race with other identities? And how can we make this more accessible? How can we relay this to people outside of academic and work spheres, how can we take this out of the privelidged circles of university?

"Collectivise, collectivise!" Says Khensani de Klerk, founder of Matri-Arch(itechture). In class, trying to form collaborations with organisations, practices, people who can bring voices to teach us to speak and understand things from other languages and other cultures. It exists, it's a matter of joining forces.

Spatial design should not be a luxury, said Karl Mok, our host. Is there space within these structures of coalition where we can use that? Can we get collectives into schools? Or even spaces that aren't educational - community centres, temples, is there space for this?

And finally: How as a designer we can respond to the idea of colouring space without cultural appropriation? How can we find the language for this without taking this language away from other cultures?

General consensus from the panel was: make sure to have a design team from lots of different approaches and backgrounds. Ask the other questions about the economics, politics and social fabrics - architects usually tend to focus on the visual, but what about how people express themselves, how they hang out? Ask who is being included, and who is being pushed out?

It's hard to ask those questions, but it is not something to shy away from.

Be confident to ask these questions. Fewer apologies for ourselves, for where we come from, and for being who we are.

Blueprint for Decolonisation was hosted by Karl Mok, from the Asian Architectural Association, with Dr Kamna Patel, Ming Cheng, Sanaa Shaikh, Khensani de Klerk, and Shumi Bose making up the discussion panel. It aired on 30th March 2021 and the full discussion is available to watch on YouTube.