Colonial policing and urban space in the notorious Commune Rouge of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo

Zooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking

Jiat-Hwee Chang : a geneaology of tropical architecture : colonial networks, nature and technoscience

For a long time architectural history has been monopolized by the “problem of the predominantly Western architectural canon.” Recently, however, architectural historians have not only started to look beyond the classical canon, uncovering or reassessing long-undervalued buildings and geographies, but have also begun questioning canonical thinking altogether. The well-trodden path of the “live-and-work” narrative is being abandoned to make way for a more fine-grained understanding of how (besi..

Myths and realities of the Belgian medical model colony : a genealogy

“At least the Belgians built hospitals!” - is perhaps the most often heard sentence within current-day public debates on Belgian colonial history. This PhD aims to question and complicate this tenacious myth of Belgian colonial medical infrastructure, by tracing a genealogy of Congo’s hospital architecture that looks beyond the conventional discourse of colonial propaganda in which this persistent platitude remains rooted. Although the colonial government consistently portrayed its medical architecture as modern, spotlessly clean, and neatly segregated facilities that followed the latest Western best practices of hospital design, reality was rather different. Not only did these complexes rarely live up to these steep ambitions, the urban location of these hospitals also often undermined strict colonial binary divisions, and the agency of African staff and patients in the architecture and everyday healthcare activities in these institutions were furthermore much more crucial than was and is recognized. Analysed at the scale of the colonial territory, the planning of the colonial network of medical infrastructure also reveals how, even though Belgian Congo’s government has been widely described as a ‘Bula Matari’ – a well-oiled, omnipotent top-down state apparatus, colonial ‘governmentality’ closely relied on improvisation, local agency and know-how, and exchange that often went against the conventional chain of command. As such, this PhD not only provides contributions to current-day debates that aim to decolonize colonial history, but also deploys Belgian Congo’s medical infrastructure as a lens to contribute to the wider, academic discussions regarding the country’s complicated history.info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

A hospital typology translated : transnational flows of architectural expertise in the Clinique Reine Elisabeth of Coquilhatville, in the Belgian Congo

Architectural historians discussing transnational knowledge exchange have primarily focused on English- or French-speaking or bilateral flows of expertise. This article goes beyond those boundaries to trace the multi-sited design process of a colonial hospital for Europeans built in Coquilhatville, the Belgian Congo. Western hospital typologies underwent multiple typological innovations as they progressed from Brussels to the colonial capital of Léopoldville, and then to the remote town of Coquilhatville. A surprising variety of actors from outside the architectural discipline―administrators, engineers, and especially doctors―impacted its design. To “translate” Western hospital typologies to the tropical climate and colonial racial inequalities, they supplemented metropolitan expertise by drawing on alternative connections provided by the Belgian Congo’s intersectional position within the colonial world. Individual travel experiences, participation in colonial research missions, and direct personal contacts with other colonial administrations all played a role. Uncovering these alternative flows of expertise in the history of Coquilhatville’s Clinique sheds light on how colonial (hospital) architecture cannot simply be reduced to direct bilateral “export.” It was actually the product of a much more complex network of architectural knowledge exchange, so far insufficiently documented by architectural historians, that transcended conventional linguistic and imperial borders