Architectural Design in the Cities of the Global South

Abstract

In recent years, architecture for international cooperation has been the focus of lively discussion, occupying larger spaces inside the disciplinary debate, while new and recurring “natural catastrophes” punctuate the agendas of international policy and threaten global economies. This paper will describe certain problematic contexts and settings that pertain to architectural design in contexts of poverty and alienation, in the conviction that these observations can reveal questions which on a wider scale have to do with the architectural discipline. For this reason, the thinking is not limited within geographical boundaries (Global South as opposed to a hypothetical North of greater development), but instead maintains a problematic perspective capable of observing crossover phenomena through the ways in which they manifest themselves.