CfP: Oceanic and South-East Asian Built Histories of Development – SAH 2025
In recent years, architectural historians have increasingly turned a critical eye toward concepts of “development” and the “Third World” as they played out in architectural thinking amid post-war contexts of decolonization and the Cold War. Nonetheless, in this scholarship, Global North-Global South trajectories of knowledge transfer concerning development tend to remain consistent with their geographical parallels and focus predominantly on North American, European, and increasingly Soviet Bloc exchanges with Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. This session will expand on these geographical constellations to examine architecture’s engagements with developmental thought in Oceanic and South-East Asian contexts, from the post-war period to the end the twentieth century.
In the aftermath of the Pacific Theatre of World War II, Australian and New Zealand foreign policies increasingly turned their attentions to (the threat of) the “near North.” These policies were shaped by regional securitization as well as by concepts of development directed by the United Nations that connected development to national self- determination, humanitarianism, and foreign aid. The session calls for papers that examine how developmental thought was channeled into architectural pedagogy, research, and practice across the region. It will ask questions such as: How were international architecture and planning fields related to development in housing, technology, climatic adaptation, and disaster relief, mediated and transformed in Oceanic and South-East Asian contexts? How did development-focused institutions (such as universities and research centers) and international organizations (such as the United Nations and the International Union of Architects, along with their regional offshoots) facilitate new transnational networks and notions of expertise? How did actors in Oceanicand South-East Asian contexts engage in practices of “worldmaking” (following Łukasz Stanek’s use of the concept) through architecture? The panel seeks papers that cast a critical lens on these histories to ask to what extent post-war development thinking built upon colonial-era frameworks.
Session Chair(s): Isabel Rousset, University of Technology Sydney; and Renee Miller- Yeaman, University of Melbourne
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Organized by SAH Australia/New Zealand