The Settler Colonial City Project is a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization.
The concept of “settler colonialism” has recently emerged as a name for a distinctive form of colonialism that develops in places where settlers permanently reside and assert sovereignty. While the settler colonial dimensions of American cities have been centered in contemporary urban activism, these dimensions have been, at best, only tentatively explored in contemporary architectural and urban studies. Investigating the settler colonial history and contemporaneity of cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas, we aim to foreground Indigenous knowledge of and politics around land, life, and collective futures, as well as settler colonialism as an unmarked structure for the distribution of land, possibilities of life, and imagination of those futures.
INDIGENIZING THE CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER Heather Miller, executive director of the American Indian Center of Chicago, and Andrew Herscher and Ana María León, Settler Colonial City Project
2-3pm, 18 October 2019, Common Ground, Chicago Cultural Center
Join us for an in-depth discussion on the Settler Colonial City Project on display throughout the Chicago Cultural Center: learn about settler colonialism and Indigeneity, past and present, and explore the ways in which settler colonialism both conjures up Indigeneity and is undone by it. Following the discussion, there will be a walk-through of "Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center," the Settler Colonial City Project's contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
