ABSTRACT
As urbanisation sweeps the Global South and cities become the most common and perhaps the only viable source for employment (and thus family livelihoods), it is important to consider the influences on their morphology historically, and how with informal urban settlement, this has radically shifted our spatial, political, social, and environmental gaze in the present. This chapter considers colonialist attitudes to the fine arts in the Global South as part of a discourse celebrating and feeding off the vitality of this work, but failing to acknowledge its authorship. The architectural corollary of these attitudes in pre-war eastern Africa (and elsewhere in the post-war period) imposed urban models from Europe without regard for cultural or environmental fit. The cleansing of informal housing globally for Olympic projects over the last 50 years confirms the durability of this mindset. Modern infrastructural schemes at various scales in the Global South indicate that by practising fundamentally different values in social policy, interactions with informality may be dynamic, transformative, and non-invasive. This suggests that new, ethical models for architectural education and practice in the global north must benefit from an authentic understanding of the subversive possibilities of such projects, and the political will necessary for their implementation.
