[extract …] South Asia will witness its greatest spatial and material transformations in the next decades, a process that will test both its practitioners and its educators. Yet, epic changes underscore its history. Entire ecologies were destroyed and transplanted for colonial agriculture and cities were created as simulacra of European places. The changes occurring today: rapid urbanisation, infrastructure development – the hypermodern superblock and flyover- had their counterparts at a smaller scale under colonial rule and at independence. Colonial and nationalist institutions or infrastructure made similar incursions into the quotidian landscape. War, famine, political restructuring and environmental disasters produced equivalent needs for refuge and resettlement. These social questions that are increasingly silenced by neo-liberal preferences have persisted and, we may argue, have been aggravated by the dislocations and displacement of globalisation. However, architecture as a profession has frequently failed to address them.

This issue on Built Space provides us with an opportunity to review the transformation of the profession during half a century, dating from the time when local schools of architecture were first set up in the mid-twentieth century; and to scrutinise the degree to which they decolonised or indigenised institutional and pedagogical models inherited from the West. The term indigenised used here references the work of two prominent scholars of South Asia, Jyoti Hosagrahar and Nihal Perera, who reflect on such processes (Hosagrahar 2005; Perera, 2002). They are part of a new generation whose scholarship, which has access to local-language sources, has transformed research on South Asia during the past two decades (See, Scriver 2010). Their most important contribution along with numerous others working on South Asia has been to identify colonial systems of power and knowledge that underscore architectural and cultural representations. As argued further by Jyoti Hosagrahar, these systems not only shape academic curricula in South Asia, more generally, but inform South Asian preconceptions of historic places and the significance of local architecture (Hosagrahar, 2002).

As argued by scholars like Sibel Bozdogan, Zeynep Aygen and Gulsum Baydar, the notion of the History Survey and the text books used in Western institutions need to be decolonised (Bozdogan, 1999; Baydar- Nalbanto lu 1998 and 2000; Aygen 2010). They need to reflect the diversity of the student body, due to increases in diasporic and international students, and moreover, they need to engage with the disciplinary lacunae exposed by postcolonial critique. Similar changes must be prompted or provoked in non-Western contexts.

This essay offers a review of a period of self-determination in South Asia and the structures that were, or failed to be, decolonised. Its objective is to identify the links between practice, pedagogy and research and call for increasing commitment to achieving their symbiosis. Historical spatial practices, studied in their many dimensions, may (we feel) reinvigorate and critique architectural practice. Our review is necessarily shaped by our education and teaching experiences.