Decolonizing Design: Notes from the Amazon

Time and time again the question of, "what is nature?" came up in my graduate landscape architecture classes. There was this feeling of both humans and our field itself being something outside of it all, maybe "above" nature, maybe something artificial.

Inside of our sterile classrooms and sleek desks, we debated this topic, and I began to wonder if the question itself was a distraction from other more important ones like why we think humans are superior to this construct of "nature" we choose to define and put in a neat little box. I wondered why we needed to define it at all.

Much of design school functioned in a similar fashion. There was a pressure to define complex ideas in simple terms. A pressure for realism. A pressure to do things a particular kind of way. A process that felt limited in ways I struggle to put into words, even to this day.

When one of our studios took place on a piece of contested land - one that had an active Land Back movement taking place on it for many years - I started to wonder what role our field plays in dominating and controlling the narrative of the land itself, of nature and of who deserves to exist where and in what ways.

I felt as though ignoring this movement would be a mistake and became very uncomfortable with the reality that landscape architecture is often a physical manifestation of colonization. We have the power to define undefinible terms in ways that make our field relevant.

We often erase the land and build over the stories and people who lived in relationship to it. I worried about how I'd cope with contributing to this erasure and development cycle when I finished school - this cycle that was never talked about. Because we never chose to define it and put it in a neat little architectural box; it was like this uncomfortable reality didn't even exist.

As I write this piece, I am living in an off grid ecovillage in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon Jungle - a place where the sound of bugs I've never even heard of constantly radiate in the background, where the seeds of the cacao plant are the most delicious things I've ever tasted, in a home where the walls are built with wild clay and the roof is made of palm leaves. It's here where I've begun to deconstruct my design school education, where I've started to understand what decolonization could actually look and feel like.

It's uncomfortable and messy for my mind and for my body, but it's a necessary task in a field that carries the power of designing what kind of world we live in.

The Myth of Modernity

Western thought teaches us that progress is linear; modernity is the peak of humanity and technological innovation grows in relation to time. But the more I travel and learn about the world, the more I question these assertions. 

The first time I came to Peru, I learned about Incan building techniques - stone walls that have withstood centuries of earthquakes without mortar, their precision and durability still unmatched. Spanish colonizers later built structures that collapsed under the same seismic forces. How is it that the supposed "primitive" methods proved stronger than colonial ones? What does that tell us about whose knowledge we value?

Even before the Inca, nations like the Cuyabas in the Colca Valley were cultivating crops at altitudes modern systems struggle to match, let alone approach, an agricultural brilliance that was displaced and forgotten through colonization.

As the impacts of climate change become worse and we see an increase in natural disasters, critical infrastructure we need to survive is at risk of collapse. Instead of looking towards future innovations for answers, perhaps we need to rethink what types of knowledge we deem valuable. Maybe the answers aren’t in future technologies but in past wisdoms we've ignored or erased. What might we discover if we centered the knowledge of the people who have always lived in relationship with the land?

Tracing Colonial Blueprints

A common theme I've observed in many towns in Latin America is a central park or plaza which serves as a focal point for social life, surrounded by government structures, tourist destinations, museums, and other important local institutions. Radiating outward are other smaller businesses and houses. I used to perceive this design as a physical manifestation of family and community, generally viewing it through a positive lens. However, I recently learned that this urban blueprint was imposed by Spanish colonizers.

Last year in Sweden, I met a woman getting her PhD in a field called hauntology, which is essentially the study of dead futures (or the lingering presence of lost or unfulfilled futures on the present). Applying the ideas of hauntology onto colonization and urban design, it makes me wonder how Latin American cities might have developed if not for Spanish colonization. What are the lingering or "dead" futures embedded in these urban spaces, and is there a way to revive them? Is it possible to decolonize design? Would there still be a central plaza, or something entirely different? What kinds of architecture might emerge?

There's another field of study called Afrofuturism which explores how African societies may have developed differently if not for colonization. Is there a parallel framework in a Latin American context that addresses similar questions?