DocTalks is a series dedicated to ongoing investigations by doctoral, postdoctoral, or early-career researchers into the expansive entanglement of architecture with the natural environment. These sessions are meant to create an intercollegiate cohort of scholars who workshop writing, share research findings, and experiment with methodological tools while engaging with the vision and investigations of the Ambasz Institute.
These Doc Talk sessions are intended for scholars of architecture history and theory, but scholars in related fields and the general public are welcome to attend.
Taming the Desert: The Great Man-Made River Project and Libya’s Extractive Colonialities
Presented by Shehrazade Mahassini, Royal College of Art London
On September 10, 2023, Storm Daniel brought torrential precipitation to the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, finally reaching the Libyan coast of Derna. The accumulated body of water, resulting from a surface runoff of the Derna Valley, exceeded the capacity of the Bu Mansour and Derna dams. On September 11, the dams collapsed. To date, estimations count a loss of 20,000 lives, or a staggering 20% of Derna’s entire population. Environmental disasters highlight a pressing need not only to restore sustainable resource management given the effects of climate change, but also to understand the historiography of extractive infrastructures. Spatiotemporally, this event extends beyond the collapse of the Bu Mansour and Derna dams. It is the accumulation of past matter, past mismanagement, and past injustices extending into the present.
This research argues that the Derna and Bu Mansour dams need to be understood within the colonial continuity of the Libyan territory and a broader nation-building scheme in the attempt to tame the desert; hence, the Great Man-Made River project (GMMR) as one of the most critical infrastructure ever undertaken by the Libyan government.
The Libyan desert hid the largest fossil water aquifer, the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, until its discovery in 1953 during a race for oil in the region. This discovery, and the water-extractive activities following it, must be situated in their spatiotemporality and anthropogenic fabric. After a protracted colonial period under fascist Italy (1911–43), followed by British and French military occupation (1943–51), the United Kingdom of Libya declared independence in 1951. Western oil companies—predominantly American, British, and Italian—began strengthening their ties to the monarchy and aiding the establishment of a Libyan elite.
Amid the climate of a new world order of the Cold War and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement in the early 1960s, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overthrew the monarchy and undertook massive territorial development based on a long-awaited process of decolonization in the hope of a flourishing independent Libyan economy. The GMMR project and its gargantuan attempt to tame the desert rapidly revealed a past returning at a gallop. This was not only an irony of the past but an architecture of extraction transposed onto the location of colonial atrocities, making space for extractive artillery. After years of planning, the construction of the GMMR started in 1984. The infrastructure often appears spectacularly engineered and utterly detached from Libya’s sociopolitical and environmental fabric, putting the accent on the technocratic capitalist extractive aspects of the project. Tracing the continuity of the colonial imperialist legacy and attempting to decolonize the archives and nationalist narratives is at the core of a new understanding of contemporary extractivism and environmental and cultural despoliation of the desert and the habitat of humans and non-humans alike.
Speaker
Shehrazade Mahassini is an architect, researcher, and educator. After her studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar, she worked in Cologne, Berlin, London, and Zurich. In 2022 she founded studio:institute, a practice that includes critical and transdisciplinary research where the intersectional lens on the built environment helps explore new typologies—between representation, negotiation, and appropriation. Parallel to her practice, Mahassini is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Embedded in post/colonial studies and Arab and Afro-feminism, her research aims to create a new narrative and questions the historicity of space production in former colonies and how it relates to segregated urban spaces in contemporary Western society. Most recently, she has taught at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne – EPFL.
Respondent
Klearjob Eduardo Papanicolaou, ETH Zurich LUS
Conservation Nationalism
Presented by Samarth Vachhrajani, Yale University
In 2015 the World Wildlife Fund declared the one-horned rhinoceros “Asia’s biggest success story” in the conservation of an endangered species. The same year, the Guwahati High Court, in India’s northeastern state of Assam, delivered a judgment to violently evict people, mainly Bengali Muslims, inhabiting the fringes of the Kaziranga National Park—home to the largest one-horned rhino population and the only Indian rhinoceros sanctuary.
Animal conservation is an indispensable environmental concern. However, it has mixed with Hindu Nationalist meanings under the rising ethnonationalism. The rhino has been inflated as a cultural and political symbol to expand the boundaries of the national park, equip park rangers with guns, and establish a profitable ecotourism economy.
My presentation attends to how “wilderness” and “nature” are constructed as nationalist symbols and how “nature” is contoured for patriotic influence. I argue that these require spatial formulas that map, demarcate, emborder, bulldoze, evict, and delete populations that do not meet the ideologically summoned idea of the nation. Therefore, my presentation, entitled “Conservation Nationalism,” showcases how spatial and environmental practices converge to orchestrate dispossession. This project unfolds how the law and logic of environmental protection employ spatial knowledge and technologies like GIS mapping and satellite imagery to make legislated denials of rights possible. The presentation will demonstrate how tectonics of pixel resolution of Google Earth satellite images, collection of geo-referenced data, plot or property sizes, and informal construction of dwellings constituted evidence for denial of rights. It interprets how infographic technologies have become increasingly employed in governance and judiciary processes. Borrowing from spatial and architectural thinking, the presentation will illustrate how technologies of spatial representation are employed as evidence for eviction around the national park to represent on-ground truth. Through “Conservation Nationalism,” the paper locates how ideas of the nation and national identity get domiciled in environmental icons like the rhino, architectural icons like the bulldozer, and technological determinism in governance practices to organize dispossession.
Speaker
Samarth Vachhrajani is a graduate student in the Yale School of Architecture Master of Environmental Design program. His research interests broadly involve questioning how architecture becomes evidence for violence under the ongoing authoritarian governance in India. He has published in Pidgin, Paprika, Bnieuws, and Datum. Recently his team was selected to edit the 58th issue of Perspecta, a journal from the Yale School of Architecture. He has participated in a research residence at the Canadian Center for Architecture, recognized by the Avery Review in their Essay Prize, and engaged in discussions at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and at conferences at TU Delft and the Society of Architectural Historians.
Respondent
Isabelle A. Tan, Princeton University
This series was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.