Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on courses which centre African watery bodies as a starting point to work through urban and architectural histories and futures, globally. Watery viewpoints disrupt the idea of origins, prompting thinking with entangled relationships across time, space, surface and depth.

Paper long abstract:

'Ocean as archive' is part of a series of architectural humanities courses run in 2022/2023 which asked students to consider how centering African engagements with water - oceans, seas, estuaries and rivers among other bodies of water - might be a starting point for thinking though urban and architectural histories and futures. Watery viewpoints ask us to look beyond points of origin, drawing on Edouard Glissant, to archipelagic and entangled relationships across time and space, surface and depth. Movement across water has been key to trade and commerce, resulting in risky, fruitful and dangerous encounters formative for built environments- from the oceanic catastrophes of the Atlantic slave trade to early global empires in the Swahili seas; Urban waterways have been tools of extraction and sites of leisure; Managing water through floodplains, land reclamation initiatives, and the construction of dams, ports and canals have been central to modernisation and development projects globally, implicated in structures of racial capitalism. In our current times, thinking with water raises urgent questions around devastating floods, creeping sea-level rise, infrastructural failure, and the increasing vulnerability of coastal communities -and asks student to question the role of the built environment in responding to these conditions. In this paper I will reflect on the first year of this course and share a range of work produced by students, which draws on critical archival and decolonial approaches to engage with speculative fiction, oral history and trans-oceanic photographic archives as a means to speak to alternative pasts and futures.