, Decolonising Euro-slums
Dr. Cristian Suau

Cristian reflects on decolonising urban practices through the reflection of informal settlements in Europe or ‘euro-slums’ as result of intensive green and climate gentrification processes. Cristian affirms that urban gentrification is a spatial manifestation of colonisation (the displacement of a dominated class ruled by a dominant one) and identifies explicit urban forms, geometries, and patterns that are silenced, stigmatised and invisibilized by dominant academia, EC and UN-Habitat, who limit our right to co-produce our cities through self-build communities and beyond formalised housing production: an architecture without architects. Cristian suggests a bridging between a critical review of “A Theory of Slums” published by Charles Stokes in 1962 and the phenomenon of gentrification in “London: Aspect of Change” coined by Ruth Glass in 1964.The discussion of the two texts was guided by the following questions:
• How can ontological and epistemological decolonization help advance urban circular habitation designs?
• What are the decolonial implications of ”human by design”?
• How to cater to equality while moving beyond anthropocentrism?
• Is there a discrepancy between Mignolo and Escobar’s decolonial understandings of ‘transition’?
• How to avoid neo-colonial appropriation? – ”if the colonizer needs to be decolonized, the colonizer may not be the proper agent of decolonization without the intellectual guidance of the damnés” (Mignolo 2007: 458)