Call for Papers: Delineating the Nation-State: Fences, Blockades, or Taking Care?
Issue 12 of Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy
Co-edited by Adrian Blackwell (University of Waterloo) and David Fortin (Laurentian University)
The building of a nation-state involves the drawing of lines on piece of paper and the transcription of those lines onto a territory. All architects’ drawings are constrained and structured by these primary processes of delineation. This journal issue will stimulate a discussion about this history in Canada by bringing together two foundational discourses about national space that have remained almost mostly separate until now: an architectural discourse about the relationship between property division and architectural form, and the history of the settler colonization of an undivided natural territory inhabited by First Nations peoples.
Inspired by the work of Aldo Rossi, Bernard Huet and Christian Devillers, George Baird and his students in Toronto undertook detailed research on the morphology and typology of North Jarvis Street in 1977. At roughly the same time Unité d’Architecture Urbaine, based at the University of Montreal, including Melvin Charney, Denys Marchand, Alan Knight and Irena Latek, undertook similar research. These approaches to the study of urban form had deep influences on the practice of architecture in their respective cities. In parallel, Phil Monture, a Mohawk historian, and the Six Nations Land Research Office, began a detailed study of land appropriation and division in the former Haldimand Tract, an area of land granted to the Six Nations in 1784, which now includes four mid-sized Ontario cities.
This issue of Scapegoat will draw connections between these two different forms of history, examining the delineation of the nation-state as an act of creative destruction, and as the foundation for contemporary uneven development, through three dimensions of modern property: fences, blockades, or ‘taking care’. The first section will focus on the ways in which the nation state was delineated during French, British and Canadian regimes of colonial land division, appropriating indigenous territory to form the infrastructure of contemporary urban space. The second will illustrate contemporary indigenous architectures of resistance to this practice, through barricades, blockades, and other actions. Finally, this issue will explore property as ‘taking care’, through Indigenous conceptions of property that existed before colonization and in examples of common property that still exists, or is being invented anew in Canada today.
Scapegoat takes submissions in the form of feature essays (4500-6500 words), projects (drawings, maps, photographic documentation accompanied by up to 2500 words of explanatory test) and reviews (1000-15000 words).
Please send an abstract of between 300 and 500 words, describing your proposed submission, to info@scapegoatjournal.org, by 15 December 2018.
If your abstract is selected, the completed submission will be due by 30 March 2019. Issue 12 will be launched in September of 2019.