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) K. Wayne Yang (UC San Diego) KaaSheGaaBaaWeak | Eladia Smoke (Laurentian University)
Moderated by Mary Lou Lobsinger
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. Trained both as architects and as architectural historians, SCCP co-founders Andrew Herscher and Ana María León will discuss the work of the collective as an intersection of practice, research, and pedagogy. In light of current prompts for change in architectural curricula, they will problematize how institutions have embraced and conflated depoliticized notions of decolonization and anti-racism.
