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.
Ana María León (University of Michigan) Andrew Herscher (University of Michigan) Paulo Tavares (University of Brasilia)
Margaret Bruchac (University of Pennsylvania)
Ana María León and Andrew Herscher, co-founders of SCCP, will present two aspects of their research: on the petro-biennial complex which explores the role of BP as lead sponsor of the biennial, reframing its ambitions; and on the colonialcene, diffusing the border between settler colonial and climate justice apprehensions of the territory.
