The Colonial Continuum of Space Production

What are the connections between the architecture of the slave ship, the architecture of the plantation, past and present apartheid and fascist regimes, and modernist/postmodernist spatial aspirations?

In these block seminars, we question space production and its established theoretical inquiry, and examine its ramifications to the polycrisis that humans and non-humans face and experience today.

Space production is inherently part of regimes of extraction and subsequently of institutionalised segregation on a planetary scale.

As many scholars remind us, historiography is an active account and fostering of past and present power structures and informs future becomings. Hence, 1492 marks the inception of the large-scale colonial extractive modus operandi, which shaped how space is thought, produced, manufactured, and used.

The colony was/is not confined to a geography outside of the Western spatial borders but was/is used by the coloniser as a laboratory to shape realities within these very borders. Consequently, the colonial and imperial boomerang operates between borders, shores, geographies and travels through time, shaping present, past and future.

Drawing from critical and decolonial pedagogies, participants are invited to situate the "reading" of architecture and its subsequent theorising and "historiographing" within the continuity of colonial projects. These seminars assert that it is impossible to understand aesthetics and spatial concepts, policy-making, laws and regulations within architecture and urbanism practices without situating them within coloniality (Quijano, 2007) and colonial binaries.

We will question the historiography of space and its architectural and urban articulation, and trace its continuities to our present. Through readings, screenings, discussions and critical writing, we will foster criticality and positionality and learn about historical and contemporary strategies to counteract hegemonic space production.

Block 1: Architecture, extractivism and coloniality—Introducing Terminology

• 06.11.2025, 10:00–14:00,15:00–19:00
• 07.11.2025, 10:00–14:00,15:00–19:00

Block 2: The Global, the National and land reclamation—Critical Urbanism

• 03.12.2025, 10:00–14:00
• 04.12.2025, 10:00–14:00,15:00–19:00
• 05.12.2025, 10:00–14:00,15:00–19:00

Block 3: The City and the Domestic—Reclaiming the right to exist

• 14.01.2026, 10:00–14:00
• 15.01.2025, 10:00–14:00,15:00–19:00
• 16.01.2026, 10:00–14:00,15:00–19:00