AR Reading List 018: The writings of Lesley Lokko

This week we launched the second episode of the AR’s new podcast AR Bookshelf, featuring architect, academic and writer Lesley Lokko. For this week’s reading list we take a look back at the writing Lokko has published in the AR since 2010.

Newly Dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York, Lokko previously established the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Africa’s first and only dedicated post-graduate school of architecture. Lokko’s writing is broad and thoughtful: in the pages of the AR she has covered the ways protests can shift the axes of power, the remittance economy, the damage of Africa’s development-aid-charity paradigm and, most recently, the democracy of shade in the AR’s April issue on Darkness. You can listen to the podcast here

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• Shady democracy: shelter from the sun is a public resource, AR February 2020
  ‘The war on shade is fuelled on the one hand by rising land values, and on the other, by weak planning governance’

• Outrage: student movement from the margins to the heart of power, AR May 2019
  ‘By bringing the protest from the edges, to the heart of power, the students were able to shift the entrenched axes of democracy’

• Migrating platforms: the remittance economy of migrant workers, AR November 2019
  ‘The increased complexity of the conditions in which architects are routinely asked to intervene requires a different lens or tactic through which the condition or ‘problem’ may be viewed’

• ‘The paradigm of development-aid-charity has come to dominate African architecture to the exclusion of almost everything else’, AR April 2017
  ‘How to translate the profound and complex multiple belief systems, diverse cultural practices, wide-ranging climatic conditions and divergent political, social and economic contexts that make up modern day Africa?’

• South Africa promising developments, AR April 2014
  ‘In the 20 years since the country’s first free and fair elections, South African cities have come a long, long way’

• Mandela’s built legacy and a new dawn for African architecture, AR December 2013
  ‘RDP, South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme is perhaps Mandela’s most troubled legacy’

• Juba, Sudan – Southern Sudan seeks to build a giant rhinoceros-shaped city, AR September 2010
  ‘Freedom, independence, equality, the future…not a million miles away from the thinking that gave rise to the modern movement’