In the introduction to “Architecture in Global Socialism”, Lukasz Stanek provides an overview of the role that socialist architectural expertise played in the Global South during the Cold War. Stanek emphasizes the respect shown towards local architectural heritage and the agency of local architects, seen in the quote from the first page: “I remember very well these Eastern European architects, because it was the first and last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana”[1]
Stanek begins by introducing the key players and geopolitical context, with the involvement of architects and planners from Eastern European socialist countries, particularly the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Poland, who offered their expertise to nations in the Global South seeking alternatives to Western models of development[2]. This expertise flowed along the routes of the world socialist system[3].
The chapter focuses on five cities, Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. The involvement of Eastern European architects offered a means to achieve emancipatory aspirations, providing technical knowledge and an alternative model for urban development[4]
Stanek provides insights into the complex geopolitical landscape of the time, discussing the Non-Aligned Movement and how it intersected with the interests of socialist Eastern European countries[5]. The pursuit of independent paths by countries like Ghana and Yugoslavia is highlighted, showcasing their desire to navigate between the capitalist West and the socialist East.
[1] Stanek, 1.
[2] Ibid, 2
[3] Ibid.
[4] Stanek, 4.
[5] Ibid, 7.
In “From the to Urban Society” Lefebvre lays out his hypothesis for the movement from agrarian society to full urban society. To Lefebvre, urban society is “a society that results from a process of complete urbanization”[1].
He goes on to discuss the temporal, and spatial nature of urbanization, which is represented as an axis from 0 to 100%[2]. Zero represents complete absence of urbanization, or “pure nature” while 100% is the completed process of total urbanization[3]. This leads to the establishment of “sign posts” to the “urban phenomenon”[4].
The first sign post in Lefebvre’s movement towards urbanization is the political city, which he contends is the first incarnation of the urban, following the historical “establishment of organized social life, agriculture, and the village.”[5]. The political city is administrative, and occupied primarily by priests, nobles, royalty, military leaders, etc, but also workers that allow the machinations of the political administration (taxes, laws, material goods) function[6].
The next sign post is the merchant city, which emerges as trade and exchange make their way into the city from the peripheries[7]. Lefebvre characterizes this as a class struggle of sorts, with the existing power structure of the political city resisting the coup of merchants beginning to subsume their administrative regime[8]. In this process commercial exchange becomes a central structural and formal organizational logic of cities, and struggle for power with political centers proliferates[9].
The industrial city is the successor to the merchant city, and like the struggle between the political city and merchant the industrial city is in conflict with merchant city[10]. Lefebvre characterizes this as the necessity of industrial production to locate labour and capital, which exist in abundance in the city[11]. An important aspect of this transition is what Lefebvre refers to as “implosion-explosion”, meaning: “the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth,goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space.”[12].
The Industrial city leads to what Lefebvre calls the critical zone. The critical zone is as Lefebvre calls it, “a black box” where we see what goes in and sometimes what comes out but what happens within is a mystery[13]. The urban proliferates in a theoretical sense, subsuming everything, with the city just a typological object within the urban.
[1] Lefebvre, 1.
[2] Ibid, 7.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 8
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 9.
[8] Ibid, 10.
[9] Ibid, 11.
[10] Ibid, 13.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid, 14.
[13] Ibid, 17.
Glen Couthard’s Introduction of Red Skin, White Mask begins with a declaration of the from the Dene of the NWT regarding their self-determination, in the context of the positioning of indigenous self-determination in the “language of recognition”[1]. Couthard is analyzing the canadian state’s positioning of assimilationist policy (pre-1969), and the subsequent language and policy that is in the “vernacular of mutual recognition”[2].
Couthard’s criticism is focused on the aforementioned recognition, which is now purposed as a liberal pluralism that attempts to reconcile indigenous nationhood within frameworks of legal and political systems within the canadian nationstate[3]. This is characterized by a shift in the modus operandi of the canadian state after its failed implementation of the “white paper” in 1969, a legal document that was proposed “deployment of state power geared around genocidal practices of forced exclusion and assimilation”[4].
Couthard delves into three watershed moments of indigenous resistance that led to the shelving of the “white paper” in 1971:
1. Indigenous rejection of the proposals in the “white paper” by the Assembly of First Nations (then the National Indian Brotherhood) – “We view this as a policy designed to divest us of our aboriginal. . . rights. If we accept this policy, and in the process lose our rights and our lands, we become willing partners in cultural genocide. This we cannot do.”[5]
2. The 1973 Supreme Court Calder Decision, in which the Nisga’a hereditary chief Frank Calder made legal claims to the un-extinguished territories of his nation in British Columbia, and while it was technically defeated in the courts, three of the six justices presiding ruled that the Nisga’a did indeed hold land rights to the contested territory prior to contact[6].
3. A cluster of events, consisting of but not limited to resistance by Metis, Dene, and Inuit peoples in the 1970s to a Canadian Government proposal to build an enormous natural gas pipeline across their traditional territories, as well as Northern Quebec Cree people’s resistance to massive hydroelectric dam development in the James Bay region[7].
Couthard then goes into the connection between Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation and its relationship to settler colonialism, both critiquing its scope and showing its potential value in analyzing canadian colonization[8]. Marx’s excavation of the transition from feudal society to capitalism as a parallel to colonization is of interest to Couthard[9]. He also looks at Kropotkin’s critique of Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation, where Kropotkin says the justification in developmentalist terms the violent dispossession of indigenous people[10].
Couthard also discusses Franz Fanon’s ideas of the maintenance of settler colonial hegemony requiring the production of colonized subjects[11]. Fanon proposes, in line with Couthards criticism of liberal pluralism, the regime of identity, culture, and recognition by way of it taking away focus from full class and liberation[12]
[1] Couthard, 1.
[2] Ibid, 2.
[3] Ibid, 3.
[4] Ibid, 4.
[5] Ibid, 5
[6] Ibid, 5.
[7] Ibid, 5.
[8] Ibid, 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid, 11.
[11] Ibid, 16.
[12] Ibid, 18.