Chipkin makes sense of Jo'burg's complex Vision

This article gives critical praise to the published work of architect & architectural historian Clive Chipkin on Johannesburg, arguing that his embedded position allows for an intimate portrait of the city and the complexities involved in the making and shaping of its architectural and urban landscape

Global experts 'off radar'

This issue of ABE Journal, which takes inspiration from a 2008 conference session as well as from the many conversations that took place within one of the working groups of the European funded COST-action “European Architecture beyond Europe,”1 seeks to contribute to a more thorough understanding of a particular type of professional who emerged in architecture and planning milieus from 1945 onwards: the “global expert”. Through a series of contributions, some resulting from long-lasting, in-depth study while others draw on work-in-progress research, a number of individuals are brought to the fore who, despite their often extensive production or prominent roles on a global scale, have remained “off the radar”. Included in this issue are discussions pertaining to people such as Michel Kalt, Henri-Jean Calsat, David Oakley, Erica Mann, or Max Lock, as well as other, more well-known figures such as Louis Kahn, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and Hassan Fathy. Through this variety, this ABE-journal issue stresses the need to distinguish between various types of such “global experts”, from embedded practitioners to foreign consultants just passing through. More importantly, the issue also seeks to outline some of the challenges confronting architectural historians in writing the history of this new kind of professional. This is done explicitly in the lengthy editorial, which, through a discussion of recent literature, serves as an introduction to the current state of research on the theme. As such, we hope that this issue will help set a possible research agenda on a topic that in the last several years has triggered scholarly attention, yet still requires a sound theoretical and methodological framing

From 'patrimoine partagé' to 'whose heritage'?: critical reflections on colonial built heritage in the city of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo

This paper questions the binary structure of the notion “shared heritage”/ “patrimoine partagé” that has emerged in recent debates on built heritage in former colonial territories. In the discourses of, for instance, ICOMOS, the notion stands for a heritage “shared” by former “colonizers” and former “colonized”, both categories being considered – albeit often implicitly – as homogenous entities. In line with Stuart Hall, I will argue for an approach to colonial built heritage that takes up the more complex nature of the question “whose heritage?” By focusing on the remarkable colonial built architecture of the city of Lubumbashi, situated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I will make a plea for re-thinking and re-positioning this legacy as a critical filter between colonial history and postcolonial memory, thus extending traditional standards of documenting built legacy through formal description and physical assessment that often isolate buildings from their urban as well as historical contexts (social, economic, cultural and/or political). Being influenced by the work of the Mémoires de Lubumbashi-group as well as recent scholarship in the field of architectural history informed by postcolonial studies, the approach on built heritage presented here is twofold. On the one hand, a plea is made to link the city’s urban form to colonial history by relating it to the cosmopolitan society that produced and experienced it. On the other hand, an approach is suggested that acknowledges how specific urban places and buildings in the city are currently being re-appropriated as “lieux de mémoire” by a variety of agents that do not necessarily (want to) share this heritage