11/29/2023 0 Comments Curved architect rulersOne of the most compelling explorations I’ve seen of where decolonization efforts might turn next was on view this summer at an architecture museum in Brussels called CIVA, for Centre International pour la Ville et l’Architecture. Scores of institutions with contested names chose new ones: Brooklyn’s General Lee Avenue was renamed for the Black Army officer John Warren, killed in Vietnam at twenty-two Junipero Serra High School, in San Diego, is now Canyon Hills High.īut what comes next? How will cities grapple with the more difficult question of what to do with fraught landmarks that are more immovable than those statues-museums, train stations, and private houses, say-or whose connections to racism or slavery, while significant, are tougher to precisely trace? Perhaps, before we can get a clearer sense of what decolonizing the city will look like, we need to better understand how, and by what architectural means, it was colonized in the first place. Protesters took this critique into the streets by toppling, decapitating, or defacing dozens of statues honoring colonial and pro-slavery figures cities, proactively, took down others. A growing critique of the imperial and colonial legacies of Western powers, accelerating with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, has cracked open the question of how European nations and the United States built the wealth that funded some of their greatest wonders of architecture, art, and urban form, and revealed the violence that supported it. What does it mean-what would it mean-to “decolonize the city”? As that phrase has become common among architects, artists, and activists in recent years, it has operated more like a slogan, a blunt exhortation, than a plan of action.
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