Lisbon, Portugal: I International Congress Colonial and Postcolonial Landscapes, Architecture, Cities, Infrastructures, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (
2019)
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Abstract
The term ‘Third World’ was first used in 1952 by the French economist Alfred Sauvy in order to stress
the division between the liberal ‘First’ world, the communist ‘Second’, and the rest of the nonaligned
‘Third’ world. During the 1970s and 1980s, the confrontation between the East and the West polarized the
dissemination of the architecture and planning concepts. The export of ‘Modernism’ and its adaptations to
the conditions of ‘Third World’ from Socialist and Capitalist countries introduced the new paradigms of
reconstruction and resettlement policies that create new urban identities in these countries. Rendering
the importance of the complex relationship between interrelated politics in the geopolitical matrix of
world war responses to a series of problematic questions on actual architectural concepts and
metapolitical strategies that frame social life in an oppressive frame. In cold war politics, urban
planning was considered to be a powerful instrument, and that the export of architecture and planning
functioned as a political apparatus by non government aid organizations, philanthropic foundations,
corporations, and individual professionals. Through archival materials including historical documents,
drawings, photographs, maps, planning transfers, and reconstruction strategies, this paper aims to show
how we can reconceptualize architecture and urban planning as a political apparatus of transnational
transfer during the Postwar reconstruction projects to create a new urban identity.