Decolonizing urban interventions
Dr. Marta Padovan-Özdemir

This seminar explores two seminal decolonial publications: 1) Arturo Escobar’s book, Design for the Pluriverse (2018) and 2) Walter Mignolo’s article, “Delinking - The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of decoloniality” (2007). Escobar picks up on basic tenets of decolonial theory and apply it to the practice of design. As such, the book embraces various disciplinary backgrounds and may inform a truly interdisciplinary decolonial framework for urban interventions. Mignolo outlines the key epistemological ambitions of decoloniality that may guide us away from the usual trappings of Euro-centric and modernist thinking.
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)