ABE Journal 21+22 | 2023 – Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy.

Read Issue 21 online here.

Read Issue 22 online here.

One of the endeavours of ABE Journal-Architecture Beyond Europe has been to unravel the relations between colonial pasts, twentieth-century building cultures, and the “global” present, not only in terms of the materiality of built environments but also epistemically. One dimension of the latter entails interrogating the particular relationships and interactions between groups and individuals connected by colonial or postwar developmental constellations. Ten years after the thematic dossier Global Experts “off radar” in issue 4 of ABE Journal, it is clear that historiographical shifts are opening up new avenues to look at some of the same phenomena. The current and forthcoming issue of ABE Journal, therefore, open with a dossier investigating Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy. These dossiers engage explicitly with questions of the postcolonial / decolonial by critically examining but also going “beyond” the sole figure of the (white) expert and engaging more intensely with the views and contributions of those who have for too long been thought of as being located at the “receiving” end of knowledge exchange. While the first part (Summer 2023) focused on expertise, the second part (Winter 2023) focused on pedagogies.

ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, nos. 21 and 22 (Summer and Winter 2023).