Kerb 28: Decentre - Designing for coexistence in a time of crisis

Editorial :

Decentre :

Designing for coexistence in a time of crisis

2020, what a year…. A spotlight on systemic racial inequality and violence, catastrophic bushfires, zoonotic pandemics, mass extinction, global heating, mass migration, geopolitical unrest.

The immensity of these events presented an enveloping imperative for our thematic framing of Kerb 28. The Anthopocene operates to decentre modernity’s self-awareness by forcing us to consider deep geological timescales and our codependence and entanglement with nonhumans.¹ In this issue of Kerb, we engage this challenge, which is well articulated in Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou and Lili Carr’s article describing their Feral Atlas project. The Anthropocene also presents us with a crisis of agency; just as we realise the immense scale of human agency,² as shown in Edward Burtynsky’s confounding photographs, we seem powerless to stop it. What means of response we have at our disposal, such as capital, are arguably what are causing the problems in the first place. We must reflect upon and assess those modes of agency in the first instance, lest we go any further down the same path.³

Where landscape architecture is engaged with this occasion, we must interrogate its particular design agency to consider the ways it is embroiled and whether it might be differently conceived and employed. As Dan Hill points out, we need to consider this occasion critically and reflectively, in order to arrive at a point of engagement that is upstream, rather than downstream. Similarly, Claire Martin highlights that a world-stopping pandemic requires us to shift our attention outwards toward environmental and trans-species health factors. In this issue of Kerb we are concerned with the foundational structures and ideas that link and propagate these events. How can they be mapped and engaged in and through the mode of landscape? In this endeavour, we might follow Hannah Hopewell and retrace critiques of landscape as a problematic way of seeing⁴ and frame for thinking that is intimately entwined with imperialism,⁵ colonialism, eurocentrism and anthropocentrism.

By posing this as a time of crisis in the singular, our ambition is to trace connectivity between these events. We have wondered why mainstream commentary (noting its vested interests) was unable or unwilling to connect the dots. The links between anthropogenic global heating, longer hotter summers and catastrophic bushfires, as articulated by Penelope Allan and James Melsom. The links between the narrow imperatives of capitalism, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction and the proliferation of zoonotic viruses and disease that Nina Lykke and Camila Marambio describe. The links between coloniality, ecological degradation, social inequality and systemic racially-based violence. It is as though the aperture through which modernity sees is just a keyhole; a keyhole that obscures our attentiveness to these links. It is now long past the time we opened the door.

We might consider this restrictive keyhole as the epistemological paradigm of modernity. Its western and settler-colonial way of knowing and responding to what is occurring to Earth is now decentred and called into question as a causative factor that has prevented us from seeing the connectivity and so realising what should be done. In the context of this shifted world and the desire for a return to normal, it is vital we reconsider the supposed normality⁶ of earth-scale socio-ecological violence driven by late-capitalist societal institutions. We contend that it is the narrow temporal aperture of capitalism (always centred on the present) that conceals socio-ecological violence across deep timescales. As deployed within the institutions of modernity, we encounter design as deeply entwined with this epistemological paradigm, industrially oriented around capitalism and its according violence. However, we might also understand design as offering an agential mode that can depart, displace and adapt this paradigm. Any pursuit of this opportunity must necessarily consider the current institutional and ideological affiliations of design agency to ensure it is responsive and not party to the structural foundations of socio-ecological violence.

In this issue of Kerb we contend that the possibility of designing for coexistence by engaging the foundations of violence, requires that we decentre and instead listen to other voices, other perspectives, and other modes of knowing and acting. We hold that this act must follow from an understanding that it is the predominant settler-colonial power structures and epistemologies that are responsible for this crisis of coexistence. We recognise that alternate modes of knowing earth cannot be simply accessed or adopted and that practices of decolonization are a precursor to receiving different perspectives on this occasion. By both hearing other perspectives and critically interrogating and decentring the dominant perspectives that have delivered this occasion, we might begin to convene a renewed possibility for coexistence.

Ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, Heterocentrism, etc.

All the entwined events of socio-ecological violence can be located in one or multiple of these categories, which are themselves all related by the foundational structure that we will refer to as centrism. Centrism establishes hierarchy through the distance from centre to a periphery, between a subject and an object, or between presence and absence. It can be projected geographically onto the landscape as in Canberra and the remote ‘outback’, between Britain and its colonies, or between the west and the orient. It can also be mapped onto the social by whoever is empowered to determine what ‘normal’ is, as critiques of medical models of disability demonstrate. In this context the call to decentre is posed as an active attempt to disrupt hierarchical logics and their production of violence. It is our site of engagement toward designing for coexistence.

This structure of centrism might also be read in the notion that we should save Earth, or a particular non-human species, because we value it more than driving cars and chopping down forests. This is the dilemma of what we might call ethical centrism. Self-interest theories of agency are subject-centred and hold that we should act because we value things, in order to maintain say, ‘ecological services’ etc. In the Anthropocene though, we have to critically reconsider these self-interest based, subject-centred modes of agency as they cannot be extended out far enough along the deep time scales with which we are concerned.⁷ Instead, we look towards practices of care and maintenance such as those described by Michael Geffel and Maria Puig De la Bellacasa.⁸ Care offers us an opportunity to act without a because, it is a subject-decentred approach to agency in the Anthropocene. In this issue of Kerb, artists Gina Athena Ulysse, Mette Ingvartsen and Janet Laurence, engage with this necessity to decentre the self, and consider our socio-ecological entanglement.

Fortunately, we know this structure of centrism is not universal. In locating the historical emergence of centrism, we might look toward Nelson Maldonado Torres, who traces the continuity between René Descarte’s ego cogito and the earlier Manichean ego conquiro.⁹ Or further back, in Genesis 1:26 wherein ‘God gave man dominion over animals’. Other authors, such as Timothy Morton, trace the origin of anthropocentrism and speciesism to the trauma of domestication,¹⁰ contending that the reduction of other beings to instruments of human use requires the institution of a primary difference from the animal. As Terike Haapoja articulates, this speciesism is also foundational to colonialism and these must be addressed simultaneously.

Peter Connolly and Shaun Rosier’s article surveys responses to this idea of correlationism, a philosophical preoccupation with the terms of the human-world relation. They articulate how in response, some posthumanist scholarship argues for shifting to systems of relations, assemblages or networks, wherein the differences between the centre and periphery are dissolved and we recognise our co-constitution with non-humans.¹¹ Other approaches have extended the condition of correlation to all objects and argue instead for flat ontologies.¹² Both approaches develop a push toward decentring the human subject and diluting human specialness. What is vitally important to recognise in an engagement with these strands of thinking is that they have been developed in correspondence with indigenous epistemological frameworks of long lineage.¹³ There are then risks of coloniality in any contention of decentring humans, that doesn’t actively recognise and foreground this contemporaneous provenance.

Coloniality is an encompassing and multifaceted system of socio-ecological violence. It is borne of a particular onto-epistemological regime that must be dismantled in our engagement with the occasion of the Anthropocene. As Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Eric Nyembezi Makoni articulate: ‘Decentring aims at making it possible for a pluriverse to emerge, a world in which many worlds coexist.’ This is a task where we (settlers) move to decentre ourselves, our holds on power, our ways of knowing, and instead enter into more equitable forms of engagement such as Greg Grabasch’s, Barbara Bynder’s metalogue, and Jock Gilbert and Sophia Pearce’s article describe. Decentring is in part about dominant power structures relinquishing their epistemological surety through active practices of deep-listening, truth-telling and repatriation. In entering into an exchange that might offer different perspectives, we must also move to confront, depart and redress the continuing violence wrought by those dominant institutions of power, and ways of thinking, knowing and acting to which we are subscribed.

In this issue of Kerb we have developed a broad framework to capture the diverse works of our contributors engaging the above interlinked centrisms. We consider three orientations within which you will find different designed approaches toward the project of decentring.

Framing

Works of critique, articulation, description and theorisation of the structures of various entwined centrisms.

Mapping

Works describing and theorising practices and processes of decentring.

Shifting

Practices of decentring, wherein the piece itself operates to decentre the reader or author.

Many of the pieces are hybrid and blend these approaches. All of these approaches begin the work of designing for coexistence by engaging with the terms of centrism and moving to decentre.

Enjoy,

Kerb editorial team ◼︎

Eric Nyembezi Makoni &

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni :

Redesigning The Modern World : A Decolonial View From Epistemologies Of The South

There is a sure correspondence between the architecture of a place and the character of the community that has settled there. Architecture plays a key role in whether a community crumbles or comes together.

Towards decentring of the modern world

There is no outside […]. [I]n the box of the Anthropocene, where humans are both everywhere and decentralised, and in which all material bodies are clustered, breathing space is limited, future is closing in, human extinction is a possible reality. One stands on one’s toes and looks for the outside.¹⁴

Decentring is a decolonial move that confronts Eurocentrism, which holds that Europe and North America are the centre of the modern world. It is well expressed by leading African intellectual Ngug Wa Thiong’o in Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, in which he articulated three imperatives in the process of moving the centre:

Moving the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all cultures.

Moving the centre within all nations from the dominant social stratum of a Europeanised male bourgeois minority to the majority of peasants, workers and women.

Moving the centre from restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race and gender. Decentring aims at making it possible for a pluriverse to emerge; a world in which many worlds coexist.¹⁵

Our thesis in this essay is that knowledge creates reality (epistemology frames ontology).¹⁶ All societies in the world are epistemic creations. In other words, their geopolitical and spatial designs can be traced back to the manifestations and realisation of specific processes of ideation as well as histories. What is problematic about Eurocentric knowledge and its creations, including the coloniser’s model of the world, is its imposition through imperialism and colonialism on the rest of the world. In short, Europe and North America’s local epistemic, geopolitical, socio-spatial and economic designs underwent a universalisation that involved Europe and North America being centred. The violent imposition of Western modernity on the restern world, meant that all other knowledges, experiences and conceptions of knowledge, power, being and nature were relegated to the periphery. As Enrique Dussel points out, the contemporary geopolitical space is defined by the West’s five-centuries-long project of imposing itself as the centre of the world, with white bodies presented as ‘all-knowing’ and thus positioned at the nucleus of that world.¹⁷

In other words, this imperial/coloniser’s design of the world and its civilisation of death that it has created through ego conquiro and ego cogito, has resulted in untold violence and misery not only for ‘othered’ humans,¹⁸ but also for the non-human bodies as well, for example the natural environment. As such, this so-called civilisation and all its colonial matrices of power must not only be decentred—it must be exposed and dismantled. In its ashes, new decolonial geopolitical spatial designs predicated on the celebration of a collectively imagined pluriversal world must be nurtured.

Colonial worlding:

the coloniser’s model of the world

James Blaut is credited with conceiving the concept of the coloniser’s model of the world. At the centre of this model have been such logics as the will to power, the paradigm of difference, the paradigm of war, the paradigm of discovery and survival of the fittest.¹⁹ This problematic binary structure was reflected in the res cogitas and the earlier Manichean skepticism of ego conquiro. As an epistemological structural binary for thought, it can be traced back to the birth of Western philosophy in Socratic discourse and the Platonic world of ideal forms. Western metaphysics, in asking what is, already generates by implication what isn’t.²⁰

These logics enabled and justified brutal systems of slavery, imperialism, colonialism and, recently, global capitalism, which perpetuated the myth of its superiority over the modern world. What emerged from this Western endarkenment (peddled as enlightenment) was the presentation and centring of Western local histories, as global designs.²¹ This brutal centring of Western local histories as universal, meant that all other histories, knowledges and conceptions of being/ontologies/subjectivities that fell outside of Western logic of rationality, were deemed barbaric, parochial and provincial—and thus non-existent.²² As Blaut points out Western modernity was forged on the myth that ‘the world has a permanent geographical centre and a permanent periphery: an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags. Inside innovates, Outside imitates’.²³ This being said, as we know it is the case that these Eurocentric epistemological structures generate massive socio-ecological violence, acting to decentre them should not be contingent on accurately pinpointing their historical emergence.

The decentring of Eurocentric global designs is predicated on the colonial matrices that include, but are not limited to, colonialities of power, knowledge, being, nature and space.²⁴ Coloniality of knowledge, predicated on the invasion of the mental universe of the rest of the world, produced coloniality of power, characterised by the longstanding asymmetrical global power relations that have fragmented the world into two zones: the centre and the periphery (with the former being the zone of being, and the latter the zone of non-being). Those country’s societies occupying the centre enjoy the privilege of dictating to and dominating the periphery in all fields of engagement from the geopolitical, right through to economic designs. Being at the nucleus of the world, the developed Western countries have also continued to impose global capitalism as the only legitimate ideologic-economic design to be followed by all and sundry.

Informing these asymmetrical global power relations, is the coloniality of knowledge predicated on the myth of the West as the only legitimate producer of real knowledge. This deliberate centring of Eurocentric knowledge was done through the use of brute force that systematically imposed slavery, imperialism, colonialism, global capitalism and the longstanding effects of these oppressive systems of subjugation, referred to as coloniality.²⁵

As the coloniality of knowledge is centred, it pushes, ignores and/or kills all other knowledges that are produced in its periphery. This occurred both geographically and temporally and was perpetrated through the universalised regime of Western history that conceived of the periphery as chronologically behind through the denial of coevalness²⁶ and a logic of civilizational developmentalism. This means, for example, that the knowledges about landscape architecture, medicine, law, science and physics that do not fall within the Western conception of knowledge are rendered useless. What emerges from these epistemicides (for example systematic suffocation and decimation of othered knowledges) therefore, is the robbing of the world of different ways of knowing, sensing, viewing and experiencing, as well as solving issues. It is this myopia of the globalised Eurocentric paradigm that constitutes the ongoing administrative inability to effectively think outside the colonial social systems generating global heating, mass extinction and the Anthropocene.

The coloniality of being, on the other hand, is characterised by Western global designs predicated on the ideology of ‘impossibility of co-presence’ between people of different races, ethnicities and sexual preferences.²⁷ Defined by radical difference, coloniality of being uses racism and racial hierarchisation as the primary principle for geopolitical and spatial ordering of the world.²⁸ Flowing from this abyssal thinking²⁹ is the unleashing of both structural and systemic violence against ‘non-Western’ human bodies that find themselves having to contend with ‘hellish existence’ as they languish in varied conditions of socio-spatial and economic marginalisation, and related markers of precarity and alterity that naturalise the ‘non-ethics of war’.³⁰

Since the idea of Western civilisation and progress has been Anthropocene-oriented over the last 500 years, it has resulted in the plundering, looting and primitive extraction of minerals, water, oils and other natural bodies referred to in capitalist lexicon as raw materials and/or resources. This treatment of non-human bodies as resources for furthering capitalist interests and profits has contributed to the destabilisation of the balance between the human and the non-human world and the destruction of the natural environment. This primitive extractivism has been contingent on a Western de-spiritualisation and rationalisation of the land through the Eurocentric epistemological regime that sees the world as an object it seeks to know or instrumentalise.

For decolonial thinkers, this centring of the human as the master of the universe stems from the logic of coloniality of nature. Primitive extractivism at a global scale has resulted not only in the destruction of the natural environment, but also in the perpetuation of wars as capitalist states, companies and firms pit communities against each other, all in the name of extracting blood minerals and fossil fuels.³¹ While these logics of coloniality are often discussed separately, they form part of a complex power matrix that is critical for the autopoietic functioning of the global coloniality. Addressing the ecological degradation constituting the Anthropocene then necessarily requires decolonising.

Reworlding from the global South:

a decoloniser’s model of the world

Having sketched out the matrix of colonialities, we propose 10 decolonial logics that can contribute to the redesigning of the world. These reconstituting logics are: deanthropocentrism, deimperialisation, desecularisation, depatriachisation, deracialisation, debourgeoisement, decorporatisation, democratisation, decanonisation and deborderisation.³²

Deanthropocentrism: This involves the removal of the human as the centre and master of all species on the planet, and the re-imagining of a post-human world defined by a mutual and reciprocal relationship between the human and the non-human bodies. As the human/non-human line is dismantled, the logics of coloniality of nature and power will dissipate, making way for the imagining of mutual economic relations between mankind and the natural environment (and the reinstating of mankind to nature of which they form but a part).

Deimperialisation of global designs and power relations: This refers to the decolonisation of asymmetrical power relations through the decentring Eurocentric modernity. Part of that involves the provincialisation of Europe and North America and as part of designing global power relations and the geopolitical space at large.

Desecularisation of spiritualities of the world: This refers to the re-centring of all spiritualities that enabled humans and non-humans to coexist harmoniously.

Depatriachisation of gender designs: This involves dismantling patriarchy and toxic masculinity and the treatment of women as lesser people. Gender as a modern organising principle that inferiorises women and reduces them to the most exploited people in the world must come to an end.

Deracialisation of everyday geopolitical and spatial designs: This refers the dismantling of the racial, ethnic and colour line at a global scale. It is premised on the recognition of common humanity and the total banishment of all forms of discrimination. From a spatial design perspective, this involves planning for racially inclusive communities, cities and the world at large. Racism must cease to be used as the primary organising principle of ordering space.

Debourgeoisement of everyday life: This is the urgent need to shift away from making a bourgeois way of life a planetary template for all lives. As the dominance of a handful of wealthy nation-states continues to impoverish the rest of the world through asymmetrical power relations, new modes of living that promote coexistence must be charted and promoted at a planetary scale.

Decorporatisation: The logic of the rule of market coloniality leading to the commodification and commercialisation of everything, including life, has weakened investment in our health systems and human security. We call for a shift from economies of profit to economies of care.

Democratisation of the world: The present asymmetrical and pyramidal structure of global power with a sole superpower supported by accumulation of weapons of mass destruction is inimical to democracy.

Decanonisation of epistemic designs: This refers to the decentring of Eurocentric knowledge that for centuries has canonised itself as universally applicable knowledge. Decanonisation, therefore, is meant to bring into the fold all knowledges that were pushed to the margins by the colonial epistemic regimes. This also means embracing relevant knowledges from indigenous people’s archives towards the creation of pluriversal ecologies of knowledges.³³

Deborderisation for mutual global mobility: This refers to the shift away from narrow nationalism that has resulted in the hard borderisation of the world, as well as the resurgence of anti-immigration sentiments across the world. As the world has always been defined by migrations, it is nonsensical for nation-states to systematically prohibit the mobility of people, while on the other hand deliberately promoting the movement of capital across borders.

There is no outside

Since there is only one world (and planet) we know, epistemic, geopolitical, socio-spatial and environmental designs must all be structured in a manner that preserves life for all species. Designing a world where coexistence between all species is possible, will therefore involve unlearning some disciplinary approaches (about design) in order to relearn new ways of seeing, viewing, experiencing and imagining inclusive utopian registers. After all, another world is possible.³⁴ ◼︎

Nashin Mahtani &

Etienne Turpin :

There is no capital :

Reflections on enthusiasm & abandonment in Indonesia

On 26 August 2019, during one of the first major announcements of his second term as president, Joko Widodo confirmed rumours that Indonesia would move its capital from its sprawling current location along the northern edge of the world’s most populated island, Pulau Java, to the province of East Kalimantan on the neighbouring island of Borneo. According to various studies and assessments, the so-called Capital District of Indonesia, known as ‘DKI Jakarta’, required relocation to address two major issues: chronic seasonal flooding during the Southeast Asian monsoon and excessive land subsidence due to rampant but unregulated groundwater extraction. As one island subsides, another is being mapped as a refuge for carefully selected survivors. In what follows, we explore how this attempt to govern from outside the crisis exemplifies current capitalist reactions to climate change.

Although it is clear that the dynamics of atmosphere, land, and water do not obey geopolitical borders, like politicians, designers have yet to fully develop the capacity to attentively engage with the multiple scales of spatiality and temporality that anthropogenic climate change requires. More frequently, design professionals are complicit in and profit from their willingness to perpetuate illusions of escape and separation. As part of our ongoing documentation of both the psychosocial and geophysical aspects of capital relocation in Indonesia, we offer this brief case study of climate change