The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
The term ‘development aid’ is as broad as the challenges it seeks to alleviate. Whose lives does it enrich? Whose does it exploit? Borne out of a simple desire to help those less fortunate – the basis of development aid is now much darker and far more complex. The transfer of resources from the so-called developed world to the developing world involves a delicate power dynamic. The notion of what is a ‘problem’ and what needs ‘fixing’, and who gets to decide as such, is entwined with the fact that aid is so often provided by former colonial powers to their previous colonies.
In the AR October issue, Ama Josephine Budge’s short story ‘No home left behind’ explores notions of sentience, queer family-making and development aid, in the context of the climate crisis. Budge gives a voice to the house, Hummfourbedwestsunfacing, whose residents are forced to flee as the waters rise. Through Hummfourbedwestsunfacing’s voice, we hear of the indelible, unintended effects of aid on a landscape at the mercy of a climate crisis. In this week’s reading list, we take a closer look at these themes through seven essays exploring development aid in the context of ecological crises.
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No home left behind, Ama Josephine Budge, AR October 2020
‘Before leaving for university, the first in her family to do so, Maame had dedicated much of her adolescence to eradicating what she called the ‘white saviour complex’ from Humm’s core ontological programming’
‘The paradigm of development-aid-charity has come to dominate African architecture to the exclusion of almost everything else’, Lesley Lokko, AR May 2017
‘The paradigm of development-aid-charity is only one facet of Africa’s potential architectural output, albeit one that has come to dominate to the exclusion of almost everything else’
Shade of meaning: clinic in Turkana, Kenya, by Selgas Cano, Ignacio Peydro and MIT students, Tomà Berlanda, AR March 2015
‘The proliferation of the Western quest for exotic adventures has led to a new form of educational colonialism’
Sea of troubles: adapting to a changing world, Will McCallum, AR April 2019
‘How do you design for future elemental attacks of which we have not yet conceived?’
Ebola epidemic: what can architecture do?, Killian Doherty, AR October 2014
‘Architectural practices and NGOs widely find opportunities to aleviate suffering through the desgn of infrastructure, buildings and amenities. But when the disaster itself is immaterial, without discernible physical damage, what role at all can a response through architecture play?’
Japan after the storm, Yuki Sumner, AR July 2013
‘Despite being given no formal role in the recovery programme following the 2011 tsunami, Japanese architects are engaging with communities and devising strategies that respond to the aftermath and plan for the future’
From camp to city: ‘Permanent is not the opposite of temporary’, Manuel Herz, AR May 2017
‘Why not establish new cities in the Global North that share some of the direct democratic, emancipatory and egalitarian principles of the Sahrawi camps, and allow us to rethink the notion of the nation state, and hence also of the citizen?’
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