THE JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE2019, 

VOL. 24, NO. 4, 469-486
https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1643390

Postcolonial urbanism across disciplinary boundaries: modes of

(dis)engagement between urban theory and professional practice

Monika Grubbauer
History and Theory of the City, HafenCity Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
ABSTRACT
This paper critically examines the epistemological status of urban professional practice, i.e. architecture and urban
design practice, in the theoretical debates on postcolonial urbanism. Despite joint interests in topics such as
subalternity, informality, and learning, we can identify various gaps between urban theory and professional practice
which contribute to the ‘alienation’ apparent in the interactions between these two disciplinary fields. The paper
discusses three aspects which are hampering a more systematic reflection of the theory–practice nexus in the context
of postcolonial urbanism: first, the dominance of the figure of the ‘global architect’; second, the lack of a truly inter-
and trans-disciplinary perspective within the popularised debate on urban issues; and third, the insistence on
epistemological difference out of tactical concerns. In contrast, the recent shifts in the intellectual foundations and
teaching approaches in architecture and urban design are not yet sufficiently acknowledged within urban
scholarship. It is shown how these fresh approaches advance a rethinking of the concepts of agency and authorship
and expand the tools and modes of acting in urban contexts. I suggest that these recent shifts within architecture and
urban design can be particularly rewarding for urban scholars to take into account in their search for new ways and
tools to address real-life problems, confront inequalities and include marginalised knowledges.

CONTACT monika.grubbauer@hcu-hamburg.de
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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Introduction: the theory–practice nexus in postcolonial urbanism

Practitioners and theorists in the field of architecture and urbanism are shifting their focus to
cities and urbanisation processes in the Global South. These are believed to provide a new lens
for understanding urban issues1 but also require new ways of thinking about design and
planning.2 There is a joint interest in providing alternative and empirically grounded accounts of
slums as spaces of subalternity3 and a joint focus on urban informality that goes beyond the
normalising discourses of urban policy and planning.4 Related to this are proposals from both
theorists and practitioners to learn from the cities in the Global South. Particular attention is paid
to self-help strategies and incremental tactics of slum dwellers in order to develop design and
planning approaches that are more sustainable and more adapted to local contexts.5
However, a closer look at the research literature and the documentation of projects,
conferences, and educational initiatives also reveals important disconnects and disengagements
between urban theory and professional architectural and design practice in the context of
postcolonial urbanism. Leading Western architects and designers active in cities of the Global
South, for instance, are frequently criticised for their actions by urban scholars.6 At the same,
ongoing changes in the intellectual foundations of the field of architecture and urban design have
not received much recognition in urban scholarship.7 Despite the popularisation of debates on
global urbanism, often within the framework of the ‘urban age’ discourse,8 there is a lack of
publications which bring together contributions by leading scholars and practitioners to provide a
systematic and in-depth exchange of arguments.
Spurred by unease about the evident alienation and even antagonism between social science
approaches to urbanism in the cities of the Global South and the actions and writings of
architects and urban designers, this paper explores the interactions between these two
disciplinary fields. It seeks to investigate the epistemological status of urban professional
practice, i.e. architecture and urban design practice,9 in the theoretical debates on postcolonial
urbanism. How, where, and why do urban scholars in debates about postcolonial urbanism refer
to urban professional practice? How is practice meant to contribute to the production
of theoretical knowledges in these debates? And how is theory thought of as contributing to
addressing practical problems?
Following Roy, postcolonial urbanism is understood as an intellectual project seeking to open
up spaces for theoretical and political debate rather than a phenomenon tied to a specific
geographical region.10 This implies that there is not only one but many ‘postcolonial urbanisms’.
Latin America, Africa, and Asia all have different intellectual traditions and histories of
colonisation, which in turn shape current debates differently.11 Still, across these diverse
experiences, knowledge about what constitutes postcolonial urbanism is generated by
interpenetration processes and at the same time by mutual critique and disengagement between
the fields of urban theory and urban professional practice. In this paper I show how the design
disciplines fulfil a twofold role in this production of knowledge: on the one side, they are
referred to in support of the claims of postcolonial urbanism in pinpointing the need to change
established perceptions and concepts; on the other side, they are presented and criticised as urban
theory’s ‘other’, as that which theory is not: compromised by power, politically naïve, lacking
scientific grounding. Going beyond the analysis of existing debates, the paper also advances
suggestions on how to deepen our understanding of the relation between theory and practice in
the context of cities shaped predominantly by informal processes and by the marginalisation of
the poor majority. In this, I take inspiration with the work of scholars on the theory–practice
nexus within the African context.12
The paper has three sections. The first section reviews existing debates on postcolonial
urbanism across disciplinary boundaries. In the second section, I discuss the gaps and
misapprehensions evident in the exchange between the fields of urban theory and professional
practice concerned with and inspired by postcolonial urbanism. I show how professional practice
is referred to both in affirmative and in critical ways in defining and legitimating the concerns of
postcolonial urbanism. In the third section, suggestions as to how a co-production of knowledge
across the theory–practice divide allows addressing ethical, political, and practical concerns of
postcolonial urbanism are outlined.
Postcolonial urbanism across disciplines: subalternity, informality and learning
Urban scholars and practitioners are united by an increasing interest in forms of self-organised
and informal urbanism in the cities of the Global South. While postcolonial perspectives in
architecture and urbanism do not yet form a consistent body of knowledge,13 three recurrent
topics can be identified: subalternity, informality, and learning.
First, there is a joint concern for theorising the megacity’s subaltern spaces and subaltern
classes beyond apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the megacity.14 Slums, in particular, are
accounted for as the ‘terrain of habitation, livelihood and politics’.15 In a similar vein, the
professed goal of giving the slum dweller a voice and visibility is informing many projects and
writings of professionals within the field of architecture, design, and planning. Particularly
prominent and influential is the work of the Caracas-based Urban Think Tank led by Alfredo
Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner.16 Besides the highly publicised work of architects
connected to leading Western architectural and planning schools such as Brillembourg and
Klumpner,17 we also find a growing number of non-academic organisations and initiatives
supporting and realising community-based design projects in the cities of the Global South.18
The second issue which is of central concern to both urban scholars and practitioners working
within a postcolonial framework, is a re-reading of urban informality that goes beyond the
dualism of formal versus informal.19 Scholars explore the diversity of informal forms of
livelihood generation and tenure situations20 and seek to assess their transformative potential
beyond the imperatives of survival and necessity.21 In similar ways, rethinking the
formal/informal divide is also a preeminent aim of architects and urban designers.22 Informal
urbanism is understood as ‘crucible of innovation’23 rather than a condition in need of
improvement.24 This interest in informal processes and structures is also informing the debates
on the scope and prospect of Do-It-Yourself urbanism.25
The third recurrent topic in postcolonial discourses within the field of urban studies and the
design and planning disciplines is learning. The idea is that there are valuable lessons to be
learned about cities and urbanism when engaging with processes of urbanisation in the Global
South beyond developmentalist frameworks.26 These suggestions have, of course, led to fierce
debates about the nature and scope of urban theory and the validity of some of its fundamental
assumptions.27 At the practical level, learning from the bottom-up strategies of informal
urbanism has become a mission statement of many design and planning educators and
practitioners.28 This goes so far as to proclaim ‘a new culture of planning and design informed by
grassroot initiatives’.29 This perspective is presently informing design studios, summer schools,
and on-site laboratories of leading international educational institutions in their activities in cities
of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.30
 One surely has to be cautious about a ‘turn to cities of the global South as a new urbanist fix’,
as Harris has pointed out.31 The present discourse on urban informality in architecture and urban
design with its emphasis on self-organisation and its fascination with the creativity and ingenuity
visible in the actions and tactics of slum dwellers, is dangerously close to the neoliberal rhetoric
of economic deregulation and state withdrawal.32 Linked to this is the danger that the interest in
informal urbanism by the design disciplines contributes to the aestheticisation of the slum
through forms of ‘poverty pornography’33 and slum tourism, which in turn may pave the way for
the commodification of these community economies.34 Finally, the notion of learning also needs
to be scrutinised against the background of globalised academic knowledge production and the
opportunities and limits for progressive forms of learning which allow marginal groups to share
local and non-scholarly activist forms of knowledge.35
My argument is that these pitfalls of postcolonial urbanism as an intellectual project which
has the potential to inform both urban scholarship and urban professional practice are
fundamentally related to unresolved questions about the relation between these two domains and
their different epistemologies and ‘ways of seeing the world’. In the ongoing debates on the
scopes and limits of urban theory there has been little concern for a systematic reflection of the
theory–practice nexus within the specific context of urbanisation processes in the Global South
and beyond. This is changing, though. The key question that some scholars have begun to
explore is whether the relation of theory and practice in the context of urbanisation processes
dominated by informal processes and shaped by poverty, inequality, and daily struggles to secure
a livelihood is and/or should be specific or not.36 I come back to a discussion of this question in
the third section.
The following section prepares the ground for this discussion by examining existing debates
about postcolonial urbanism in terms of the epistemological status of urban professional practice
in these debates. I show how there are both engagements and disengagements in the ways in
which urban professional practice, i.e. architectural and urban design practice, is granted the
capacity to inform the intellectual project of postcolonial urbanism.
Modes of (dis)engagement
One should think that the shared topics discussed in the previous section would provide a fertile
ground for communication and exchange of arguments between urban theorists and urban
practitioners. Indeed, there is a rising interest in urban issues beyond disciplinary boundaries and
beyond the confines of academic research. One source and driver for this interest in the ‘urban’
as a site of inter- and trans-disciplinary debates and interventions are the activities of global
institutions such as the UN and the World Bank and a range of private financial and cultural
institutions. While planners have always to some extent drawn on and worked with social
science concepts, architects and urban designers committed to a critical spatial practice now
seem to be embracing the social sciences. By trying to show how the design professions have
come to think (again) beyond merely physical aspects of the built environment they take
inspiration from the social sciences, for instance, to account for social and economic aspects of
informality.37 Educators at architecture and planning schools explore forms of learning which
engage with communities and real-life problems.38 At the same time, given the general shift of
the architectural academy and their curricula towards an urban focus,39 urban theory has become
an important frame of reference for many design and planning practitioners and educators. There
is a range of journals and online platforms which operate at the intersection of theory and
practice and seek to make urban debates accessible to a wider public.40
In contrast, urban scholars engaged in theoretical debates on postcolonial urbanism or global
urbanism more broadly do not take much notice of the recent developments in the design
disciplines. Surely, the reference to professional practice in the form of activities and writings of
designers and planners is frequently used to document and illustrate an (often vaguely defined)
global ‘public’ interest in the (informal) urbanism of the Global South. In such cases, the
difference between theory and practice and its different epistemologies is sometimes not
theorised at all and sometimes practice examples serve to illustrate particular theoretical
arguments. Varley, for example, provides an important and insightful discussion of recent work
on urban informality in Latin America and how it relates to the wider literature at the intersection
of postcolonial and urban studies.41 Interestingly, she draws on projects and writings by
architects such as Alfredo Brillembourg, José Castillo, Teddy Cruz, and Jorge Mario Jáuregui to
map the field and to point out some of the ambivalences of the ‘celebration of the contingent,
ephemeral nature of informal settlements’.42 In contrast, Roy in Slumdog Cities, for example,
refers to the work of architect Teddy Cruz to illustrate how the intellectual project of
postcolonial urbanism goes beyond mere theorising. Cruz is renowned for his bottom-up housing
projects at the San Diego–Tijuana border which are realised with local advocacy groups and
which recycle and reuse materials from demolished houses in the US. Roy presents Cruz’s work
in terms of his search for ‘alternative urbanisms of transgression’43 as example of subaltern
urbanism.
Beyond such examples where differences between theory and practice are either not broached
at all or used mainly for illustrative purposes by urban scholars, however, there are also more
fundamental reasons for a neglect of the theory–practice nexus in the discourse on postcolonial
urbanism. These are found in three modes of disengagement discussed below: first, the
superficial reading of each other’s sources and arguments within a popularised interdisciplinary
debate on urban issues; second, and partly resulting from the first, the reading of the field of
architecture and design practice through the dominant figure of the ‘global architect’; and third,
an emphasis on epistemological difference which conceives of architects as urban theory’s
‘other’.
Popularised interdisciplinary debates
Disengagement results, first, paradoxically, from the type of interdisciplinary debate that
dominates much of the popular discourse on urbanism. High-profile publications such as The
Endless City of the Urban Age Project44 have established a style of interdisciplinary debate
which tends to rely on an eclectic mix of statements from influential thinkers and practitioners.
This type of interdisciplinary inquiry into topics of global urbanism is flourishing due to major
cultural institutions engaging in similar projects, which typically combine travelling exhibitions,
multi-sited workshops, and publications. The latest example of these kinds of projects is Uneven
Growth. Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities by The Museum of Modern Art in New
York. The catalogue features essays by social scientists Ricky Burdett, David Harvey, and Saskia
Sassen and by architects Teddy Cruz and Nader Tehrani, along with a documentation of design
scenarios and interventions developed by interdisciplinary teams working on the cities of Hong
Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro.45
Although it is positive that key texts and positions get popularised across disciplines through
such projects, I have doubts as to whether they are a beneficial contribution to theoretical
debates. For design practitioners and students alike, volumes such as The Endless City or Uneven
Growth are much more easily accessible than any of the peer-reviewed journals in the field of
urban studies. Yet, these disciplinary crossovers tend to be eclectic in nature and mostly lack
systematic consideration of conceptual categories.46 It is a small number of social scientists who
are granted authority to contribute their views and comments in these exhibitions and
publications. Similarly, the number of designers and planners whose work is featured in such
projects is limited. If it comes to design and planning interventions in informal settlements the
projects of Francis Kéré, Noero Wolff Architects, Cruz, Brillembourg and Klumpner, Jorge
Mario Jáuregui, and the Chilean Elemental are by now standard examples.47 Finally, a more in-
depth consideration of the theory–practice nexus within these popularised debates on global
urbanism is also limited by the profound North–South bias in the presentation and dissemination
of the results of such projects financed by Western schools and cultural institutions. Exhibitions
are often not shown and publications are not available in the cities of the Global South which
serve as sites of these projects.48
Dominance of the global architect
The second reason for disengagement between theory and practice in the discourse on
postcolonial urbanism is the dominance of the figure of the global architect49 which has become a
particularly important trope in urban studies debates. Whenever urban scholars argue for the
interconnected nature of urbanism today, globally travelling celebrity architects are a standard
reference, whether on a general level or by the names of Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, or Rem
Koolhaas. Architects as ‘transfer agents’50 and ‘knowledge actors’51 are firmly situated on the
side of power and held responsible for the transnational circulation of ideas and the global
reproduction of urban phenomena. In the postcolonial critique of developmentalist approaches
within urban theory, policy, and practice, architecture and planning practices are consequently
presented as prime vehicle for ‘the export or proliferation of a supposedly “Western” modernity
around the world’,52 both in the colonial past and in the post-independence present. A case in
point for the preoccupation of scholars with the figure of the global architect is the repeated
reference to Koolhaas's work on Lagos, which has been running through key publications on
postcolonial urbanism for a decade. Gandy53 was the first to criticise Koolhaas and The Harvard
School of Design’s project on Lagos, arguing that Koolhaas's morphological treatment of the city
in terms of a complex, self-regulatory system, was in fact de-historicising and de-politicising its
experience.54 Gandy’s reading was picked up by several authors in key texts on postcolonial
urbanism such as Robinson,55 Roy,56 Myers,57 and Arabindoo58 as well as some (architectural)
theorists who expanded on Gandy’s argument.59
Koolhaas conveniently fits into the long-established picture of the modernist architect
travelling the world to bring change for the better; a picture that is perpetuated by the global
architect as part of the typical ‘travelling band of international experts’60 engaged in projects
such as the Urban Age project. My concern is that this kind of critique might come all too easily.
It keeps an old story going and makes poor use of the insights of more interesting and more
progressive approaches in the field. Yet, behind the routinised critique of global architects such
as Koolhaas, there appears to be a more profound alienation at work between theorists and
design and planning practitioners; an alienation which is not limited to debates on postcolonial
urbanism but which nevertheless acquires particular relevance here.
Architecture as urban theory’s ‘other’
The third mode or instance of disengagement from practice in the theoretical debates about
postcolonial urbanism which I wish to point out is found in the insistence on epistemological
difference. Ultimately, urban scholars refer to the works and writings of architects and urban
designers also for the sake of strengthening their own positions. Architects are easily presented
as the opposite of theorists, and their simplistic and merely aesthetic views on urban informality
are branded as naïve and politically easy to instrumentalise. Referring to the debate on
Koolhaas’s work on Lagos, Arabindoo notes that ‘Koolhaas’s outlook is characteristic of
architectural and cultural theorists who generally turn to aesthetic imagination and representation
to develop a theory of a global slum, one that constructs reality out of fantasy and fiction’.61 Roy
adds: ‘Koolhaas’ ideas are best paired with those of influential global policy guru, Hernando de
Soto’,62 who has been criticised for his idealisation of market forces, land titling, and individual
initiative.63
In such debates positions of architects found beyond the theoretical debates of urban
scholarship are nevertheless referred to in terms of a scholarly debate, e.g. in terms of ‘a theory
of a global slum’ as Arabindoo puts it.64 Thus, the potentially important critique of the political
impact and empirical accuracy of the architects’ positions is substantiated by the irreconcilable
differences between the disciplines in terms of their approaches to constructing, analysing and
solving problems — the social scientists’ interpretive paradigm versus the architects’
commitment to real-world interventions. However, the ambivalence of the work of architects and
planners as travelling experts such as Koolhaas, Foster, and others ultimately results more from
the system of peer recognition, global mass media, inter-urban competition and transnational
norm-making65 than from the fact that design disciplines will inevitably turn to aesthetic
imagination and representation at some point. Moreover, the alienation between urban theorists
and design practitioners is further deepened by the theorisation of bottom-up, self-organised and
subaltern forms of urbanism in opposition to the actions of urban professionals.66 Vasudevan, for
instance, in his important theorisation of how the global geographies of squatting can inform our
conceptualisation of urban lifeworlds, remains silent on how practitioners committed to the
transformation of real-world situations might approach the city.67 He presents postcolonial
urbanism as an urbanism from below which has no place for professional intervention.
Taken together, the prevailing focus on the figure of the ‘global architect’, the architects’
aesthetic means of operation, and the discipline’s alliance with power, conceals important
intellectual shifts. There are design practitioners who are acutely aware of both the complicit role
of built environment professionals in the imposition of state power and their dependence on
private capital. They seek to develop approaches to overcome these limitations and
dependencies. These approaches need to be brought in closer dialogue with theoretical debates
within urban studies and specifically with debates on postcolonial urbanism. The last section
offers some thoughts on how to use the shifts in architecture and urban design practice and
education to take urban theory beyond the figure of the ‘global architect’.
Towards a co-production of knowledge
The common realities of the majority of inhabitants in the cities of Latin America, Africa, and
Asia are dominated by informal processes and structures, with all the difficulties that it entails:
insecurity of livelihood generation, conditions of violence, vulnerability to state repression, lack
of infrastructure, and environmental health risks.68 In light of the dire living conditions of most
urban dwellers in African cities, Myers in his book African Cities makes a strong argument for
the close interrelationship of theory and practice, suggesting that ‘the theoretical concerns are
important, but the need to cut through abstraction may be equally so, given how pronounced the
“real concerns of people” are in most cities, where the poor comprise visible majorities’.69 In a
similar vein Ernstson, Lawhon, and Duminy in an insightful paper in Regional Studies claim that
the harsh realities of life in African cities cause ‘a reluctance to step back too far from the issues
on the ground’ and that under these circumstances ‘generating empirical practice-oriented
research can appear the most urgent and ethical option’.70 They propose ‘engaged theory-
making’ and ‘platforms of engagement’ as two key concepts emerging from the African
experience to feed into the broader field of urban studies.
The scale and depth of the needs of the poor in cities shaped by processes of informal
urbanisation surely justifies a concern with the relevance of academic research for solving issues
on the ground. At the same time, research findings show that informal settlements are themselves
highly differentiated; informality means something very different in different contexts depending
on the region, city, and particular institutional or legal framework. Moreover, with increasing
socio-spatial polarisation, rising levels of poverty and indebtedness, and the marginalisation of
migrant and minority groups equity issues are also crucial in crisis-ridden Europe and North
America. While there certainly is ‘an iterative relationship between what is seen and what is
studied in African (and all) cities’,71 I suggest that it is unnecessary to assume
a categorical difference in the theory–practice nexus between Global North and Global South, as
Myers and Ernstson et al. seem to propose. This implies that a commitment to solving real-life
problems and the ‘desire for relevance’72 in the scholarly engagement with urban issues is
equally relevant in the Global North and South. Connected to this are ethical concerns to address
real-life problems, political concerns to confront structural inequalities, and not least
also practical concerns to include marginalised and local knowledges. I suggest that recent work
of design practitioners engaged in collaborative projects with (informal) communities has the
potential to fruitfully contribute to all three of these challenges.
In what follows, the specific skills and strategies of design practitioners in approaching
people and places and the related shifts in the intellectual foundations of the design disciplines
are outlined: first, the ability of design professionals to engage with local contexts and involve
non-experts in defining the task at hand; second, the way in which actual projects have
transformative potential by empowering those involved to engage with their spatial environment;
and third, the tools and methods of interaction with laypeople which provide situated learning
experiences for students which impact on their mindsets and values.
Addressing real problems
Problem-solving lies at the heart of design and planning practices. The belief in resolvability and
unambiguity has historically resulted in deterministic approaches to people’s behaviour and a
schematic/normative view of the user.73 However, fresh approaches — variously discussed under
the terms public interest design, community design, design activism, humanitarian architecture
and others — are seeking to change the way problems are defined from the outset, for instance
by rethinking the concepts of agency and authorship74 and by challenging the orthodoxies of
architectural history.75 Rejecting established concepts of professional expertise as well as
institutionalised forms of participation, these new approaches are characterised by an explicit
emphasis on action. They also seek to acknowledge the contributions of non-experts in defining
the problems to be addressed in design and planning practices. Spatial agency, as outlined by
Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, hinges on the social production of space rather
than ‘the static objects of display that constitute the foreground of so much architectural
production’.76
When looking into collaborative and bottom-up design projects’ modes of operation across
the Global North and South we can see similar strategies of ‘transgression’. These include
critically interrogating briefs and instructions, proactively initiating projects, supporting self-
enumeration and community-led mapping, accepting non-monetary forms of exchange and
payment, appropriating underused resources and spaces, and building networks to join forces and
share knowledge.77 The interest in re-defining agency and authorship in design and planning
practice translates currently into a surge of design/build studios and live projects at architecture
and planning schools.78 The specific quality of these projects lies in their engagement and
communication with local communities. Yet, the marginalisation of the urban poor and the
unequal distribution of political power in many cities of the Global South surely pose grave
barriers for community building and learning through such co-design and co-production
initiatives. It may be doubted that these temporary projects in the context of informal settlements
will in all cases serve as ‘a starting point for more permanent transformation’.79 Moreover, at
times they seem to succumb to a fetish of the vernacular in assuming that the authenticity of a
building’s material and structure in terms of local building traditions is sufficient to argue for a
positive social impact.80 Nevertheless, they surely provide for social learning experiences and the
transformation of the students’ sense of their professional identity.
Confronting inequalities
The general shift towards the urban as an object of inquiry and a site of intervention within
architecture and urban design81 is reflected in the restructuring of curricula and the establishment
of urban research centres and laboratories. This shift opens up opportunities for a re-
politicisation of design practice: While dispensing with radical political agendas, many
practitioners engaged in urban interventions and improvisations see a chance to act critically by
concentrating on ‘the politics and practice of small incursions in material spaces, the possibilities
they open up and the forms of sociality they might entail’, as Tonkiss observes.82 This is based
on the belief that the empowerment of others ‘in allowing them to engage in their spatial
environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them’83 constitutes a political
endeavour and might effect social change. More generally, so-called ‘socially engaged’ building
and design practices seek to be relevant on the ground and to improve life in the neighbourhoods
through hands-on approaches and a preference for small incursions over big plans. This leads to
‘the explicit rejection of expert knowledge in favour of participation of non-experts, self-
organisation, learning and improvisation by (local) communities’.84
The reach and impact of this ‘social’ turn in architecture and design is currently under debate.
The ‘social’ in these discourses is mobilised ‘as a placeholder for entities as diverse as civil
society, community, initiatives, gatherings as well as the wider public’.85 Especially in contexts
where projects are commissioned rather than self-initiated, the transformative potential seems
more than doubtful.86 Moreover, the overconfident belief in enhancing public urban life and,
indeed, producing urbanity through urbanism from below87 entails also the risk of contributing to
the construction of ‘new myths of marginality’.88 Tonkiss reminds us that ‘there is a great
distance between the DIY urbanism of a resting creative class in the cities of the rich world and
the subsistence strategies of get-by urbanism in the cities of the poor’.89 Similarly, Van
Ballegooijen and Rocco90 criticise that the appropriation by architects and planners of John
Turner’s ideas about self-help housing as means of empowerment and autonomy over the past
decades has, in fact, contributed to the de-politicisation of the housing problem.
Including marginalised knowledges
Despite the above ambivalences, design practitioners are clearly expanding their tools and
methods of operation through their renewed activist and participatory engagement.91 Their toolkit
now includes the most diverse methods such as interviews and story-telling, mapping techniques
and various forms of visual documentation, collaborative workshops, the elaboration of guides
and manuals, exhibitions and public events, game-playing and the use of social media, as well as
all kinds of material interventions.92 Equipped with these tools, practitioners are able to engage
with communities in participative processes and mutual learning as part of ‘tactical
learning’93 experiences of marginalised groups as well as dialogic forms of urban democracy.
When involving slum dwellers in slum upgrading projects, the workshops include walks,
observations, conversations and discussions, interactive games, drawing and modelling, in an
attempt to value local knowledges which otherwise would go unheard — typically those of
women, youth, and elderly.94
However, forms of mutual learning and the shared production of knowledge will take time;
mutual trust and cooperation need to be built up by working together on a daily basis.95 The
typical two-week live project or participatory design workshop is arguably the minimum amount
of time to spend that will allow serious engagement with local communities. Acknowledging
these limitations, design and planning educators are increasingly interested in action research and
forms of service-learning96 that allow long-term engagement with communities. A major
question is also how the experiences of one particular case can be made accessible to others. The
dangers implicit in unreflectively adopting best practices developed elsewhere in the context of
‘restless’ policy cultures’97 have been extensively discussed. Innovative approaches in teaching
thus seek to go beyond transnational learning through universalising technologies, standard
recipes and iconic projects. They emphasise situated and experiential learning and facilitate a
focus on ‘rich narratives’98 based on in-depth case studies. The type of knowledge produced thus
is more nuanced and attuned to complexities of specific urban situations and students are
encouraged to develop a value-based activist and advocacy agenda through their engagement
with poor communities.99
Conclusions
In this paper I have sought to show that the critical preoccupation of urban scholars inspired by
postcolonial approaches with the figure of the global architect, along with a strategic use of
arguments to construct architects as urban theory’s ‘other’, leaves little room to go beyond a
certain type of routinised, often superficial interdisciplinary exchange that prevails in popular
debates over global urbanism. I have argued that in theorising postcolonial urbanism recent shifts
within architectural and urban design practice and education have been neglected. Yet the work
of critically minded design and planning practitioners and educators can provide inspiration
when seeking ways and tools to address real-life problems, confront inequalities and include
marginalised knowledges. The reason for this lies in the ways in which design practitioners are
able to approach local communities: going beyond institutionalised forms of participation and
public consultation by engaging in the joint realisation of actual projects and empowering
citizens in their uses of urban space.
Within the design and planning disciplines there is considerable debate about how this recent
participatory turn in urbanism is to be evaluated.100 The crucial question is whether the
‘participatory platform [as] dominant model for activism and experimental practice’101 is capable
of fulfilling the original demands for participation in giving marginalised groups a political
voice. Maros Krivy and Tahl Kaminer note how the centralised and powerful welfare state which
was targeted as the major adversary of critical advocacy groups in the 1960s has vanished,
criticising that ‘the weakening of the state has strengthened citizens qua entrepreneurs (of
themselves) rather than strengthening them qua political actors’.102 I agree that there is a
profound ambivalence in the anti-statism of many contemporary urban interventionist practices.
Maybe the most interesting of these are those which explore not only ways of transgressing the
rules and norms of the state but also the rules and norms imposed by markets. Yet, exactly this
ambivalence of bottom-up and participatory design and planning approaches can provide for
inspiration to assess whether and how these real-life experiences and interactions between
practitioners and communities have the potential to feed back into theorising.
Clearly the transition between disciplinary boundaries has become more fluid and rigid
distinctions between experts and laypeople, as well as differences in the modes of operation
between urban theorists and urban practitioners are getting smoothed out. Rather than clinging to
the dichotomy of theory versus practice, it thus seems useful to conceive of theorising and
practising as interwoven and inherently reciprocal activities, not as separate knowledge domains
of particular groups. On the one hand, this might usefully require ‘un-disciplining design’ in the
sense of putting into question ‘a disciplinary division of labour between “qualified” urbanists and
those outside the field’.103 On the other hand, it might mean for those who are engaged in
theorising, to take the proliferation of critical approaches, toolss and operations of acting in
urban contexts more seriously. While it is evident that solving real-life problems in cities shaped
by informal urbanisation has urgency, there is no need to establish categorical differences
between North and South. It only blurs the fact that exploring the close links between theorising
and practising is at least equally relevant for European and North American countries.
The crucial question is how to facilitate these conversations and extend the ‘zones of
exchange’104 and ‘platforms of engagement’105 that scholars have called for. Both academic
knowledge production and the popularised debates on global urban issues are rather limited
means to provide grounded knowledge across distances beyond the standard sample of well-
published cases. It surely requires opening up and diversifying the people, places, means and
processes of knowledge production.106 Yet, in the search for first-hand experiences and grounded
evidence I suggest being careful not to introduce new orthodoxies of critical practice. Much of
what is written about the intellectual shifts within design and planning practice is produced by
scholars and educators in institutions based in Europe and North America — this paper is no
exception. Learning from in-depth narratives about alternative and bottom-up projects needs both
first-hand encounters and observations on site, or thorough reports and analyses from people who
are involved and have the skills and the capacity to produce such accounts.
Notes
1.
Ananya Roy, ‘The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory’, Regional Studies, 43 (2009), 819–
30; Garth Myers, African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice (London: ZED books,
2011).
2.
Vanessa Watson, ‘Seeing from the South: Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe’s Central Urban
Issues’, Urban Studies, 46 (2009), 2259–75; Libby Porter, ‘Informality, the Commons and the Paradoxes for
Planning: Concepts and Debates for Informality and Planning’, Planning Theory & Practice, 12 (2011), 115–
20.
3.
Pushpa Arabindoo, ‘Rhetoric of the “Slum”’, City, 15 (2011), 636–46.
4.
Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia, ed.
Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); Rethinking the Informal City.
Critical Perspectives from Latin America, ed. Felipe Hernández, Peter Kellett, and Lea K. Allen (New York
and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012); Urban Informalities: Reflections on the Formal and Informal, ed. Colin
McFarlane and Michael Waibel (Ashgate, 2012).
5.
Alfredo Brillembourg, Kristin Feireiss, and Hubert Klumpner, Informal City: Caracas Case (München:
Prestel, 2005); Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models: Mumbai, São
Paulo, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cape Town, ed. Marcos Rosa and Ute Weiland (Berlin: Jovis, 2013); Justin
McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (London: Verso, 2014).
6.
Matthew Gandy, ‘Learning from Lagos’, New Left Review 33 (2005), 37–52; Andrew Harris, ‘The Metonymic
Urbanism of Twenty-first-century Mumbai’, Urban Studies, 49 (2012), 2955–73.
7.
Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing
Architecture (London: Routledge, 2011); Nadia Anderson, ‘Public Interest Design as Praxis’, Journal of
Architectural Education, 68 (2014), 16–27; Aseem Inam, Designing Urban Transformation (New York and
London: Routledge, 2014).
8.
B. Gleeson, ‘What Role for Social Science in the “Urban Age”?’, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 37 (2013), 1839–51.
9.
Planning literatures are not so easily located in terms of the theory/practice divide, some are explicit
contributions to social theory while others target primarily questions of professional practice. I consider
planning literature where appropriate, but the focus of the paper is on architecture and urban design.
10.
Ananya Roy, ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 35 (2011), 223–38.
11.
Ann Varley, ‘Postcolonialising Informality?’, Environment and Planning D-Society & Space, 31 (2013), 4–22.
12.
Sophie Oldfield, Susan Parnell, and Alan Mabin, ‘Engagement and Reconstruction in Critical Research:
Negotiating Urban Practice, Policy and Theory in South Africa’, Social & Cultural Geography, 5 (2004), 285–
99; Henrik Ernstson, Mary Lawhon, and James Duminy, ‘Conceptual Vectors of African Urbanism: “Engaged
Theory-Making” and “Platforms of Engagement”’, Regional Studies, 48 (2014), 1563–77.
13.
Jyoti Hosagrahar, ‘Interrogating Difference: Postcolonial Perspectives in Architecture and Urbanism’, in The
SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London:
Sage, 2012), pp. 70–84.
14.
Alan Gilbert, ‘The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 31 (2007), 697–713; Abdoumaliq Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the
Crossroads (London, Routledge, 2011); Melanie Lombard, ‘Constructing Ordinary Places: Place-Making in
Urban Informal Settlements in Mexico’, Progress in Planning, 94 (2014), 1–53.
15.
Roy, ‘Slumdog Cities’, p. 224.
16.
Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, Torre David. Informal Vertical Communities (Zürich: Lars
Müller Publishers, 2013).
17.
Brillembourg and Klumpner hold the Chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH Zurich).
18.
Examples include the well-known Architecture for Humanity and Architecture Sans Frontières International,
as well as a number of younger internationally operating non-profit social design networks and companies
founded within the last couple of years, e.g. the Community Architects Network active in Asian countries or
the US-based IDEO.org and MASS Design.
19.
See note 4.
20.
Jean-Louis Van Gelder, ‘Tales of Deviance and Control: On Space, Rules, and Law in Squatter
Settlements’, Law & Society Review, 44 (2010), 239–68; Seth Schindler, ‘Producing and Contesting the
Formal/Informal Divide: Regulating Street Hawking in Delhi, India’, Urban Studies, 51 (2013), 2596–612.
21.
Neema Kudva, ‘The Everyday and the Episodic: The Spatial and Political Impacts of Urban
Informality’, Environment and Planning A, 41 (2009), 1614–28.
22.
Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, ‘Rules of Engagement: Caracas and the Informal City’,
in Rethinking the Informal City, ed. Hernández, Kellett, and Allen; Jorge Mario Jáuregui, ‘Urban and Social
Articulation: Megacities, Exclusion and Urbanity’, in Rethinking the Informal City, ed. Hernández, Kellett, and
Allen.
23.
Rahul Mehrotra, ‘Foreword’, in Rethinking the Informal City, ed. Hernández, Kellett, and Allen, pp. xi–xiv.
24.
Louis Rice, ‘Informal Architecture/s’, in Transgression: Towards an Expanded Field of Architecture, ed.
Louis Rice and David Littlefield (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 87–101.
25.
See for instance, Margaret Crawford, ‘The Garage Sale as Informal Economy and Transformative Urbanism’,
in The Informal American City. From Taco Trucks to Day Labour, ed. Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia
Loukaitou-Sideris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
26.
Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006).
27.
Jamie Peck, ‘Cities beyond Compare?’, Regional Studies: The Journal of the Regional Studies Association, 49
(2015), 160–82.
28.
Maurice Mitchell, Learning from Delhi: Dispersed Initiatives in Changing Urban Landscapes (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2010); Ceridwen Owen, Kim Dovey, and Wiryono Raharjo, ‘Teaching Informal Urbanism:
Simulating Informal Settlement Practices in the Design Studio’, Journal of Architectural Education, 67 (2013),
214–23; Camillo Boano and Giorgio Talocci, ‘Fences and Profanations: Questioning the Sacredness of Urban
Design’, Journal of Urban Design, 19 (2014), 700–21.
29.
Rosa and Weiland, p. 212.
30.
The most prominent examples include the international studios conducted by Rem Koolhaas at Harvard, the
Studio-X laboratories of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservations at Columbia
University, the DPU summer lab series at the Bartlett School of Planning, and the international studios
conducted at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.
31.
Harris, p. 2960.
32.
Matthew Gandy, ‘Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos’, Urban
Studies, 43 (2006), 371–96; Jan Van Ballegooijen and Roberto Rocco, ‘The Ideologies of Informality:
Informal Urbanisation in the Architectural and Planning Discourses’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (2013), 1794–
810.
33.
Roy, ‘Slumdog Cities’.
 34.
Vandana Desai and Alex Loftus, ‘Speculating on Slums: Infrastructural Fixes in Informal Housing in the
Global South’, Antipode, 45 (2013), 789–808.
35.
Colin McFarlane, Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2011).
36.
Oldfield, Parnell, and Mabin, ‘Engagement and Reconstruction in Critical Research’; E. Pieterse, ‘Cityness
and African Urban Development’, Urban Forum, 21 (2010), 205–19; Myers; Ernstson, Lawhon, and Duminy.
37.
Informalize! Essays on the Political Economy of Urban Form, ed. Marc Angélil and Rainer Hehl (Berlin: Ruby
Press, 2012).
38.
Nadia Anderson, ‘Public Interest Design as Praxis’; Community Matters: Service-Learning and Engaged
Design and Planning, ed. Mallika Bose, Paula Horrigan, Cheryl Doble, and Sigmund Shipp (London:
Earthscan, 2014); Chad Schwartz, Laura Morthland, and Shannon McDonald, ‘Building a Social Framework:
Utilising Design/Build to Provide Social Learning Experiences for Architecture Students’, Architectural
Theory Review, 19 (2014), 76–91.
39.
Dana Cuff, ‘Architecture’s Undisciplined Urban Desire’, Architectural Theory Review, 19 (2014), 92–97.
40.
For the German context see for instance the activities of the journals dérive and sub\urban.
41.
Varley.
42.
Ibid., p. 15.
43.
Teddy Cruz, ‘Levittown Retrofitted: An Urbanism beyond the Property Line’, in Writing Urbanism: A Design
Reader, ed. Douglas Kelbaugh and Kit Mccullough (London: Routledge, 2007), cited in Roy, ‘Slumdog
Cities’, p. 229.
44.
The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred
Herrhausen Society, ed. Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London: Phaidon Press, 2007).
45.
Uneven Growth. Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, ed. Pedro Gadanhao (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 2014).
46.
e.g. Brillembourg, Feireiss, and Klumpner, Informal City.
47.
e.g. Andres Lepik, Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 2010); Awan, Schneider, and Till; Rosa and Weiland; Varley.
48.
Harris.
 49.
Donald McNeill, The Global Architect. Firms, Fame and Urban Form (London: Routledge, 2009).
50.
Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward, ‘Assembling Urbanism: Following Policies and “Studying Through” the
Sites and Situations of Policy Making’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (2012), 42–51 (p. 46).
51.
Jane Jacobs, ‘Urban Geographies I: Still Thinking Cities Relationally’, Progress in Human Geography, 36
(2012), 412–22 (p. 414).
52.
Robinson, p. 4.
53.
Gandy, ‘Learning from Lagos’.
54.
Ibid., p. 39.
55.
Robinson.
56.
Roy, ‘Slumdog Cities’.
57.
Myers.
58.
Arabindoo, ‘Rhetoric of the “Slum”’.
59.
Joseph Godlewski, ‘Alien and Distant: Rem Koolhaas on Film in Lagos, Nigeria’, Traditional Dwellings and
Settlements Review, 21 (2010), 7–20; Laurent. Fourchard, ‘Lagos, Koolhaas and Partisan Politics in
Nigeria’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35 (2011), 40–56.
60.
Harris, p. 2957.
61.
Arabindoo, p. 639.
62.
Roy, ‘Slumdog Cities’, p. 227.
63.
Alan Gilbert, ‘De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Reflections on the Book’s Public Impact’, International
Development Planning Review, 34 (2012), v–xviii.
64.
Arabindoo, p. 639.
65.
e.g. Michael Guggenheim and Ola Söderström, eds., Re-shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms
Architecture and Urban Form (London: Routledge, 2010); James Faulconbridge and Monika Grubbauer,
‘Transnational Building Practices: Knowledge Mobility and the Inescapable Market’, Global Networks, 15
(2015), 275–87.
66.
Solomon Benjamin, ‘Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy Beyond Policy and
Programs’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2008), 719–29.
67.
Alexander Vasudevan, ‘The Makeshift City: Towards a Global Geography of Squatting’, Progress in Human
Geography, 39 (2015), 338–59.
68.
Rethinking the Informal City, ed. Hernández, Kellett, and Allen; Africa’s Urban Revolution, ed. Susan Parnell
and Edgar Pieterse (London: Zed Books, 2014).
69.
Myers, p. 16.
70.
Ernstson, Lawhon, and Duminy, p. 1569.
71.
Ibid., p. 1567.
72.
Oldfield, Parnell, and Mabin, p. 287.
73.
Rob Imrie, ‘Architects’ Conceptions of the Human Body’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
21 (2003), 47–65; Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache, ‘Architectural Handbooks and the User Experience’,
in Kenny Cupers, ed., Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 35–
50.
74.
Jeremy Till, ‘Scarcity and Agency’, Journal of Architectural Education, 68 (2014), 9–11.
75.
Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, ed. Kenny Cupers (London: Routledge,
2013); Consuming Architecture: On the Occupation, Appropriation and Interpretation of Buildings, ed. Daniel
Maudlin and Marcel Vellinga (London: Routledge, 2014).
76.
Awan, Schneider, and Till.
77.
Vanessa Watson, ‘Co-Production and Collaboration in Planning – The Difference’, Planning Theory &
Practice, 15 (2014), 62–76; Diana Mitlin and Sheridan Bartlett, ‘Editorial: Co-production – Key
Ideas’, Environment and Urbanization, 30 (2018), 355–66.
78.
Anderson, ‘Public Interest Design as Praxis’; José L. S. Gamez and Janni Sorensen, ‘No More Waiting for
Superman: Teaching DIY Urbanism and Reflexive Practice’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on
Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 7 (2014), 1–18; Schwartz, Morthland, and McDonald, ‘Building a
Social Framework: Utilising Design/Build to Provide Social Learning Experiences for Architecture Students’.
79.
Anderson, p. 21.
80.
Marcel Vellinga, ‘The Noble Vernacular’, The Journal of Architecture, 18 (2013), 570–90; Monika
Grubbauer, ‘In Search of Authenticity: Architectures of Social Engagement, Modes of Public Recognition and
the Fetish Of The Vernacular’, City, 21 (2017), 789–99.
81.
Cuff.
82.
Fran Tonkiss, ‘Austerity Urbanism and the Makeshift City’, City, 17 (2013), 312–24 (p. 313).
83.
Awan, Schneider, and Till.
84.
Anna Richter, Hanna Katharina Göbel, and Monika Grubbauer, ‘Designed to Improve?’, City, 21 (2017), 769–
78 (p. 769).
85.
Ibid.
86.
e.g. Monika Grubbauer, ‘Mainstreaming Urban Interventionist Practices: The Case of the BMW Guggenheim
Lab in Berlin’, Footprint (2013), 123–30.
87.
Daniela Fabricius, ‘Revolution of the Ordinary’, Architectural Design, 82 (2012), 42–9.
88.
Fran Tonkiss, Cities by Design. The Social Life of Urban Form (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 108.
89.
Ibid.
90.
Van Ballegooijen and Rocco.
91.
These methods and tools are certainly not all that new. Much of this goes back to the experiments with
participative planning and artistic practices in urban space of the 1960s and 1970s which are now rediscovered.
92.
Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, ed. Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford (New York: Metropolis
Books, 2008); Awan, Schneider, and Till.
93.
McFarlane.
94.
e.g. Alexandre Apsan Frediani, Matthew French, and Isis Nuñez Ferrera, Change by Design. Building
Communities Through Participatory Design (Napier: Urban Culture Press, 2011); Camillo Boano and Giorgio
Talocci, ‘Inoperative Design: “Not Doing” and the Experience of the Community Architects Network’, City,
21 (2017), 860–71.
95.
See for instance Rachael Unsworth, Sue Ball, Irena Bauman, Paul Chatterton, Andrew Goldring, Katie Hill,
and Guy Julier, ‘Building Resilience and Well-Being in the Margins within the City: Changing Perceptions,
Making Connections, Realising Potential, Plugging Resources Leaks’, City, 15 (2011), 181–203.
96.
Susan Thering and Victoria Chanse, ‘The Scholarship of Transdisciplinary Action Research: Toward a New
Paradigm for the Planning and Design Professions’, Landscape Journal, 30 (2011), 6–18; Bose, Horrigan,
Doble, and Shipp.
97.
Patsy Healey, ‘The Universal and the Contingent: Some Reflections on the Transnational Flow of Planning
Ideas and Practices’, Planning Theory, 11 (2012), 188–207 (p. 193).
98.
Ibid., p. 196.
99.
Duminy, Odendaal, and Watson report how such a ‘live-case’ approach is applied with benefit to accompany
education reforms in Africa by the Association of African Planning Schools in cooperation with local affiliates
of Shack/Slum Dwellers International, among others, see James Duminy, Nancy Odendaal and Vanessa
Watson ‘The Education and Research Imperatives of Urban Planning Professionals in Africa’, in Africa’s
Urban Revolution, ed. Parnell and Pieterse (London: Zed Books, 2014), pp. 184–99.
100.
Maros Krivý and Tahl Kaminer, ‘Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism’, Footprint (2013), 1–6.
101.
Ibid., p. 2
102.
Ibid., p. 3
103.
Tonkiss, Cities by Design, p. 12.
104.
Philip Harrison, ‘On the Edge of Reason: Planning and Urban Futures in Africa’, Urban Studies, 43 (2006),
319–35.
105.
Ernstson, Lawhon, and Duminy.
106.
Oldfield, Parnell, and Mabin, p. 296.