Post by Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft

What should we consider global progress? Tosin Oshinowo’s public lecture on 20 April as part of her Jaap Oosterhoff visiting professorship put this question at the centre. Her lecture challenged the dominant top-down approach to city building, built on the assumption of endless growth. Through her curation work and a reading of colonial history, she highlighted the extractive logic that has shaped the built environment, and the broken contract between humanity and ecology: while we keep increasing our economic output, carbon emissions and planetary harm continue to worsen. Specifically, she traced how markets were once the heart of civic life but were gradually detached from specific places by industrialisation. The way out, she argued, is not pursuing perpetual growth but embracing constraints. While architecture is often associated with central plans and permanent buildings, she instead looked at the Global South and specifically the markets of Lagos for inspiration. The scarcity of resources and lack of central governance have sparked a culture of self-organisation, adaptive reuse, and collective knowledge that sustains the city. She concluded that architectural interventions should not only be ambitious, but locally grounded. In her vision the urban designer is in the first place a listener and works with what is already there. After her lecture, a panel of students from the EXTREME studio and moderator Job Schroën continued the conversation on her work and the challenges faced by the new generation of designers and engineers. Photos by Jesse Verdoes