ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Beyond Erasure: Alternative Understandings of Colonial Legacies in Urban and Rural Spaces

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral SS 08 | Transformative planning actions from the South: Negotiating the past for alternative futures

Speaker

Dr Kundani Makakavhule (University Of Pretoria)

Description

Colonial histories persist in contemporary urban and rural landscapes through processes of erasure, resistance, and re-imagining. This presentation examines case studies from several countries in the Global South. Cases from Mumbai, Argentina, Ecuador, Malaysia, and South Africa, reveal how communities contest the ongoing entanglements between coloniality and contemporary spatial transformations. Through oral histories, ethnographic insights, and spatial analysis, these cases uncover how infrastructure projects in Mumbai displace fisherwomen, undermining their traditional livelihoods. In Ecuador, urban resignification emerges as a strategy to reclaim colonial spaces, where communities actively resist state-led homogenization. In Argentina, contested urban commons expose the friction between neoliberal real estate development and the persistence of colonial power structures. Meanwhile, Kuala Lumpur’s urban governance in Malaysia still reflects British colonial logic, deepening contemporary spatial injustices. In South Africa, the concept of (s)place offers a transformative framework to heal cognitive injustices, reintegrating and revaluing indigenous knowledge into rural development. These insights contribute to the global decolonial movement by highlighting how spatial struggles reflect broader fights for epistemic justice and self-determination. By centring local agency and alternative narratives, this presentation advocates for a decolonial praxis that dismantles colonial hierarchies, fosters community-led planning, and reclaims spaces as sites of resistance, belonging, and cultural continuity.

References

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