Decolonizing Architecture: Stories From the Canadian North

This is the story of nearly thirty years of my work where I aimed to support the creation of culturally appropriate architecture and the promotion of sustainable building practices. Much of this work was directed towards the development of culturally appropriate, energy efficient housing in the Canadian north, carried out in collaboration and direct consultation with Indigenous communities. My story is entangled with the stories of five northern communities in Canada, one northern community in the USA, and a Tibetan refugee community in India. This story is written as a self-reflection that is deeply personal and is intended to lead towards better understandings of the processes of creating housing with communities through something I call ‘decolonizing architecture’. My story is a kind of auto-ethnography, written from the perspectives of white privilege, human ecology, and architectural design. This work takes a practice-based approach where, as a son within an immigrant family, an advocate, a builder, an architect, and a person who lives within Canadian society, I reflect upon my own practices. To make sense of my story I reflect upon typical Western ways of practicing architecture and turn to the principles used and promoted by Indigenous scholars when working in their own communities to advance ideas on how architecture can be practiced differently. The decolonized approach I propose is partially a response to the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, but also a means to de-centering euro-western ways that architects typically use. Decolonizing architecture means removing the euro-western biases and architectural design practices/processes that dominate the design of buildings in Northern Canada. It aims towards creating culturally appropriate buildings and settlements by working with Indigenous people that live in these communities, while shifting the attitudes/beliefs of practitioners who are from outside these communities. The decolonizing architectural process I describe illustrates seven core values learned from my own work and include: establishing the architects location, the building of relationships (including the relationship to the land), embracing alternative ways of knowing, listening to stories, making differently, seeing Indigenous spirituality as an integral part of all things, and using our ‘agency’ for the benefit of Indigenous communities. The chapters of this thesis detail the seven values which are presented as a series of vignettes’ with the aim of encouraging architects to embrace and slow down the collaborative creating process so that it is more mindful and honours the people who need to live, for many generations, with the architecture that is produced. My hope is that my story will aid future architectural designers working in the Canadian North, as well as those working with Indigenous cultures in other parts of the world, to embrace approaches and processes that bring the voices and practices of the Indigenous peoples to the forefront of architectural design.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.