Cosmopolitanism’s Agents and Architectural World making

Of late, much has been written about transnational networks of architectural practice and expertise in the mid-twentieth century, and understandably so, given the seismic geopolitical changes at that historical juncture. These networks emerged when decolonization and the formation of new nations combined to create a new international order. Within this schema, cosmopolitanism as an embedded political consciousness and solidarity is intensified. Decolonization and nation-building were not only particular and anti-universal processes: they frequently entailed what scholars like Adom Getachew have called “worldmaking”—the creation of broader transnational alliances and solidarities that sought to reorder the international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy inherited from Euro-American imperialism. At the same time, architectural practice itself was also being restructured around new modes of organization beyond the traditional firm. These included multidisciplinary collaborative practices and large state-linked or corporate entities directly or indirectly connected to foreign aid programs, regional associations, national and international development schemes, and circuits of transnational capital flow. The attendant restructuring of the geopolitics of architectural production and the organization of architectural labor means that questions of the architect’s belonging, subjectivity, and agency in this period must be carefully reconsidered historiographically. While many accounts of the circulation of knowledge and the movement of architects, planners, and designers across politically demarcated territories challenge and expand existing histories of modern architecture, most of these accounts continue to privilege the white male architect and the organizations he dominated in Europe and the geographical North as primary subjects. Work by non-white actors and non-white organizations remain largely invisible. Even when they are included, such accounts tend to relegate them to secondary roles as passive local collaborators and informants. They are consigned to being actors with limited cosmopolitanism and highly circumscribed agency within the transnational networks of architecture and planning. Even if many were educated in the metropole and practiced in a transboundary manner, their work was routinely described as a local response, not entirely understood within broader global discourses. A dialectic of such “local cosmopolitanism” and internationalism offers a means to historical recuperation as some might even have actively participated in architectural forms of worldmaking to reorder the structure behind the hegemony of Euro-American architects and architectural ideas. Even those who practiced within their national territories have contributed to the transnational networks by modulating and modifying them. The articles in this special issue focus on such marginalized figures of cosmopolitanism and their work of worldmaking. Through them and their work, these articles challenge us to reconsider the notion of