Culture Politics & the Built Environment – serie

Over the course of the nineteenth century, drastic social and political changes, technological innovations, and exposure to non-Western cultures affected Germany's built environment in profound ways. The economic challenges of Germany's colonial project forced architects designing for the colonies to abandon a centuries-long, highly ornamental architectural style in favor of structural technologies and building materials that catered to the local contexts of its remote colonies, such as prefabricated systems. As German architects gathered information about the regions under their influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—during expeditions, at international exhibitions, and from colonial entrepreneurs and officials—they published their findings in books and articles and organized lectures and exhibits that stimulated progressive architectural thinking and shaped the emerging modern language of architecture within Germany itself.Offering in-depth interpretations across the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies, Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Since architectural developments in nineteenth-century Germany are typically understood as crucial to the evolution of architecture worldwide in the twentieth century, this book globalizes the history of modern architecture at its founding moment.

Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities.Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

Shortlist, 2025 Architectural Book Award in Architectural TheoryTo study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from Europe, a very different continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, scholars and architects of the Americas have the responsibility of looking at their built environments through their own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

Longlist, Jan van Gelder Prize, Dutch Society for Art HistoryWorld Observation explores the archives and architecture of Itō Chūta (1867–1954), the eminent architectural thinker of the Japanese empire, who traveled across Asia, Europe, and North America to create the first world history of architecture in Japanese from a truly global set of encounters. In his mission to integrate Japan into existing world histories, legitimate Japanese colonial expansion, and train observers to see the world in the way that he did, Itō theorized new kinds of “observation” (kansatsu) in writing and drawing that strategically blended epistemological values from European science, philosophy, and anthropology with Japanese Buddhism, folklore, and naturalism. World Observation presents close readings of Itō’s writings, sketches, and designs to cast new light on a key figure in the architectural history of Imperial Japan and situate his contributions within the sweep of global architectural history across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Territory in Conflict explores Israeli and Palestinian projects of modernization and development in the Gaza Strip, from the outset of Israel’s military occupation in 1967 to the Oslo Accords of 1993. Rather than reduce the Gaza Strip to an arena of war and violence, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat resurrects the urban and architectural history of Gaza’s cities and the varied perspectives and identities of the people who shaped them. Through a close examination of planning activities in occupied Palestinian territory focusing on development, settlement, and security, her book highlights the collision between Israeli occupation, Palestinian nationalism, and regional peace processes; politics of class and citizenship; contestation between camps and cities; and the tensions inherent in Israeli development policies designed to establish lasting control over the territory’s demographics and resources. Abreek-Zubiedat probes the power of architecture in conflict zones, illustrating the agency of Gaza’s cultural elite: its mayors, architects, and engineers. At the same time, she draws attention to alternative voices, Gaza’s local inhabitants and refugees—illuminating the conflicts, complexities, and contradictions of settler colonialism in the Middle East. Her innovative approach to urbanization, resettlement, and rehabilitation in the Gaza Strip offers a groundbreaking account of the Israel-Palestine conflict that goes beyond the limited framework of colonizer/colonized binary, restoring Gaza’s cities in the public eye and giving voice to the people who inhabit them.

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure, showing how the built environment of the railways fostered segregation through physical isolation and reinforced hierarchies according to race, ethnicity, and class. Catherine Boland Erkkila highlights the magnitude of this forced separation: how spatial design and the experiences within it reflected prejudices of contemporary middle-class Americans who viewed immigrants as poor, diseased, and dangerous. Spaces of Immigration draws attention to the control wielded by railroad companies and government officials, who dispatched European immigrants to ethnic enclaves across the Midwest, some of which still exist. This book ultimately offers a greater understanding of the immigrant experience in America through the lens of spatial history, revealing deeply embedded conflicts still pervasive in our society today.

In Atlantic Unbound, Peter Minosh examines neoclassical architecture within the Atlantic World—a site of colonialism, resource extraction, commodity circulation, capital, and slavery spanning Europe, North America, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Minosh focuses on France during the expansion of its colonial empire and the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue during and after the Haitian Revolution, and the United States in the decade following the ratification of the Constitution. By analyzing architecture’s relationship to revolutionary politics, colonial practices, and Enlightenment discourse, this book reveals buildings, cities, and landscapes as products of transnational exchange and cross-cultural interaction that shaped the modern world. By positioning neoclassical architecture within colonialism and slavery and rethinking its role in Atlantic revolutions, Atlantic Unbound reorients neoclassicism as a globalized modernity—a negotiation of global systems and hybrid sovereignties.

Between 1973 and 1990, the authoritarian military dictatorship of Chile maintained its control through a network of detention and torture centers designed to create fear and isolation. Spatial Solidarities illuminates how architects, artists, activists, and other political agents resisted the Chilean regime through spatial practices. Within these spaces, prisoners responded creatively: producing drawings, performances, and architectural projects; rearranging their bodies and living areas; and connecting through songs, shadows, and mutual care. They collected resources, created systems of mutual aid, and smuggled out site plans and names to expose the regime’s crimes. Some imagined their detention centers as free towns, reversing the logic of imprisonment through theatrical acts. These cultural responses, Ana María León argues, are forms of spatial solidarity—acts of connection, care, and imagination. By focusing on spatial history, León reclaims the experiences of the disappeared through the spaces they shaped, conveying how architecture can be a tool for resistance, justice, and collective survival.

Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves.In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through the establishment of norms and networks that frame human conduct, action, identity, and design. They follow design as it functions through the body, in the home, and at the state and international level. Overall, Aggregate views the intersection of architecture with the human need for what Foucault termed \u201cgovernmentality\u201d—societal rules, structures, repetition, and protocols—as a way to provide security and tame risk. Here, the conjunction of power and the power of design reinforces governmentality and infuses a sense of social permanence despite the exceedingly fluid nature of societies and the disintegration of cultural memory in the modern era.

The devastation of World War II left the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade in ruins. Communist Party leader Josip Broz Tito saw this as a golden opportunity to recreate the city through his own vision of socialism. In Designing Tito’s Capital, Brigitte Le Normand analyzes the unprecedented planning process called for by the new leader, and the determination of planners to create an urban environment that would benefit all citizens.Led first by architect Nikola Dobrovic and later by Miloš Somborski, planners blended the predominant school of European modernism and the socialist principles of efficient construction and space usage to produce a model for housing, green space, and working environments for the masses. A major influence was modernist Le Corbusier and his Athens Charter published in 1943, which called for the total reconstruction of European cities, transforming them into compact and verdant vertical cities unfettered by slumlords, private interests, and traffic congestion. As Yugoslavia transitioned toward self-management and market socialism, the functionalist district of New Belgrade and its modern living were lauded as the model city of socialist man.The glow of the utopian ideal would fade by the 1960s, when market socialism had raised expectations for living standards and the government was eager for inhabitants to finance their own housing. By 1972, a new master plan emerged under Aleksandar Ðordevic, fashioned with the assistance of American experts. Espousing current theories about systems and rational process planning and using cutting edge computer technology, the new plan left behind the dream for a functionalist Belgrade and instead focused on managing growth trends. While the public resisted aspects of the new planning approach that seemed contrary to socialist values, it embraced the idea of a decentralized city connected by mass transit.Through extensive archival research and personal interviews with participants in the planning process, Le Normand’s comprehensive study documents the evolution of ‘New Belgrade’ and its adoption and ultimate rejection of modernist principles, while also situating it within larger continental and global contexts of politics, economics, and urban planning.

Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than Riches traces multiple international origins of austerity as an essential ingredient of postcolonial development. By prescribing model villages, communities, and ideal houses for the working class, this project of austerity eventually reduced poverty into a stylized architectural representation. In this rich and original study, Karim explains the postwar and postcolonial history of low-cost housing as an intertwined process of global transferences of knowledge, Cold War cultural politics, postcolonial nationalism, and the politics of economic development.

Although race—a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination—has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality—from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants—Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.

Winner, 2021 CAAA Charles Rufus Morey Book Award | Winner, 2021 On the Brinck Book Award | Shortlist, 2020 MSA First Book PrizeIn the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of “race” and “style” as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists—Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze—to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.

Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico's unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country's architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexisted.Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragan, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. This book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture captivated architects whose work was formally dissimilar, and how that concern became central to the profession.

Architects, politicians, and planners have repeatedly framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper, rather than integral components of the urban landscape with their own layered histories and often unrealized potentials. Describing a site as a bidonville––the francophone equivalent of the shantytown––positioned it as a foil to and catalyst for new architectural projects, anticipating and authorizing its targeting, control, and dispossession. In this richly illustrated study, Sheila Crane charts the emergence of the bidonville, a term first consolidated in Casablanca following the establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912 that was subsequently used to categorize and systematically target urban areas across Morocco, Algeria, and beyond—processes that continue to shape planning and urban landscapes today. Tracing significant episodes that extend into the post-independence period, Crane reveals how the bidonville became a potent artifact of the colonial city and a formative site for anticolonial thinking and action. Far from self-contained enclosures, sites deemed bidonvilles were shaped by dynamic human and non-human entanglements central to this book.

In Atlantic Unbound, Peter Minosh examines neoclassical architecture within the Atlantic World—a site of colonialism, resource extraction, commodity circulation, capital, and slavery spanning Europe, North America, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Minosh focuses on France during the expansion of its colonial empire and the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue during and after the Haitian Revolution, and the United States in the decade following the ratification of the Constitution. By analyzing architecture’s relationship to revolutionary politics, colonial practices, and Enlightenment discourse, this book reveals buildings, cities, and landscapes as products of transnational exchange and cross-cultural interaction that shaped the modern world. By positioning neoclassical architecture within colonialism and slavery and rethinking its role in Atlantic revolutions, Atlantic Unbound reorients neoclassicism as a globalized modernity—a negotiation of global systems and hybrid sovereignties.

Between 1973 and 1990, the authoritarian military dictatorship of Chile maintained its control through a network of detention and torture centers designed to create fear and isolation. Spatial Solidarities illuminates how architects, artists, activists, and other political agents resisted the Chilean regime through spatial practices. Within these spaces, prisoners responded creatively: producing drawings, performances, and architectural projects; rearranging their bodies and living areas; and connecting through songs, shadows, and mutual care. They collected resources, created systems of mutual aid, and smuggled out site plans and names to expose the regime’s crimes. Some imagined their detention centers as free towns, reversing the logic of imprisonment through theatrical acts. These cultural responses, Ana María León argues, are forms of spatial solidarity—acts of connection, care, and imagination. By focusing on spatial history, León reclaims the experiences of the disappeared through the spaces they shaped, conveying how architecture can be a tool for resistance, justice, and collective survival.

Finalist for the 2026 ASALH Book AwardFinalist for the 2026 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in the Social Sciences Access to educational resources has been a tool of liberation for Black Americans from the antebellum period to the present. With this book, Amber N. Wiley emphasizes the value of education as a means for social equality—Black Americans wanted the American Dream to apply to them, and equal opportunity for quality education was at the forefront of making that dream a reality. Model Schools in the Model City chronicles how Black Washingtonians used public education as a means of racial uplift in the face of entrenched white resistance and repeated assertions of white supremacy. For Black Washingtonians, it was the school building—a permanent structure, made of sturdy material—that was the physical realization of Black liberation, agency, and the right to exist as citizens of the United States. Furthermore, it was the school building that stood as the litmus test to whether Black Washingtonians’ citizenship was perpetually guaranteed; thus, they fought with all the tools at their disposal to maintain access to quality education in the nation’s capital. In this book, Wiley recounts the untold story of Black Washingtonians’ educational ambitions, especially as they were manifested in the schools themselves.

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure, showing how the built environment of the railways fostered segregation through physical isolation and reinforced hierarchies according to race, ethnicity, and class. Catherine Boland Erkkila highlights the magnitude of this forced separation: how spatial design and the experiences within it reflected prejudices of contemporary middle-class Americans who viewed immigrants as poor, diseased, and dangerous. Spaces of Immigration draws attention to the control wielded by railroad companies and government officials, who dispatched European immigrants to ethnic enclaves across the Midwest, some of which still exist. This book ultimately offers a greater understanding of the immigrant experience in America through the lens of spatial history, revealing deeply embedded conflicts still pervasive in our society today.