Abstract

How did exchanges between the architecture, engineering, and construction sectors of postcolonial states challenge dominant patterns of North–South technology transfer, and actively begin to construct the substantive scaffolding of an alternative international order? This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding South–South exchange as a distinct spatial practice in postcolonial architectural history, recovering previously unexplored patterns of circulation—construction technologies, professional expertise, contracting capacity—that connected allegedly peripheral geographies spanning from Southeast Asia and Africa to the Caribbean and Southeast Europe. It draws on Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, Anna Tsing’s theorization of ‘friction’, and Édouard Glissant’s ‘archipelagic thinking’ to develop three analytical movements: Geometries, Powers, and Archipelagic Relations. Together these map the lateral circulation of expertise, technology, and labor among postcolonial nations operating outside the North-South and East–West axes around which twentieth-century architectural history has largely been organized. The paper argues that the prevailing diffusionist model resembles a two-body gravitational system that forecloses the possibility of lateral force, and treats South–South exchanges instead as orbital anomalies, persistent deviations from predicted paths that reveal an unseen distributed gravitational field. Rather than organizing around a metropolitan vertex, this field constitutes what computational geometry calls an ‘unstructured mesh’: contingent, uncentered, and variable in its local density. The mesh’s topology traces across a range of exchanges drawn from the forthcoming edited volume South–South: Non-Alignment and Cooperation in the Construction of the Global South, which brings together contributions from a dozen scholars of postcolonial architecture. The case studies include triangulations in which prefabrication technology traveled between Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Angola, and professional expertise looped between India, Africa and Europe. The motivational fields and frictions that drove and transformed each exchange are examined in turn. The article culminates in a reading of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Afro-Asian Housing Organisation (AAHO) through Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity—the right of postcolonial actors to participate in exchange without becoming fully legible to Cold War systems that demanded every alignment be declared. By challenging prevailing narratives that position the ‘Global South’ primarily as recipient rather than generator of innovation, the article contributes to a decolonial architectural historiography that shows how the political project of Non-Alignment was substantively materialized in the production of the built environment. Recovering these alternate forms of architectural flow demands a South–South historiographical orientation as a corrective to the field’s persistent centeredness, and offers historical insight no less relevant today for rethinking the potential, and the challenges, of contemporary transnational cooperation.

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