Drawing on the concept of conscientização (1) allows us to address the spatio-temporal dimension in Freire’s text, and particularly the identification of multiple sites of contestation that have developed historically, informing the terms in which different groups of people interact. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed these groups are represented by the oppressor and the oppressed (2). In fact, rather than groups of people as such, oppressor and oppressed signify sites with conditions of social existence, or situationality in Freire’s usage, and are connected to specific historical and political contexts. None of these sites is static – all are constantly changing – yet all evolve in an interconnected manner.

This complex understanding of social situatedness undermines critiques of Freire’s work according to which oppressor and oppressed are static and clearly defined positions. They clearly exist in opposition to one another but are not outlined in such a way that differences between them could be easily reconciled. Committed as he was to a Marxist ideology, Freire invokes the notion of “revolution” as a way to transform both sites and, thereby, the world, or at the very least the entire Brazilian society. He concedes – almost apologetically – that he is not a “true revolutionary” (3), yet he relies on the transformational capacity of the concept of revolution in order to convey the almost inconceivable change of liberating the oppressed. He insists that any transformation of the world ought to start at the bottom because it is not in the interest of those at the top to change it. However, revolution is not conceived either as the elimination of conflict between contesting sites, leading to absolute harmony. It transpires that multiple sites do exist and will never cease to exist. Therefore, education arises as the principal means to create consciousness about people’s situations in the convoluted social structures of mid-twentieth century Brazil, and, once consciousness is achieved, initiate a transformation.

At this point it is useful to situate The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the Latin American intellectual context of the 1960s and early 1970s, and to connect it with two similarly influential publications: Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual, by Orlando Fals Borda, and Las venas abiertas de America Latina by Eduardo Galeano (4). Both coalesce around the idea of liberation, as well as the urgent need to develop “our own science”, “a Latin American way of thinking”, and to re-discover knowledges occluded by several centuries of intellectual colonialism in order to dismantle structures of domination, dependency and oppression. Each author takes a different route to ascertain the latter conditions. Galeano, for example, embarks on an ambitious revision of Latin American history, from the conquest to his present, arguing that the European and later The United States have extracted resources and exploited the region throughout its entire history: they suck the continent’s blood literally and metaphorically. In turn, Fals Borda concentrates on the way social scientists approach knowledge and research methods, often giving priority to European and North American ideas rather than their own. His invitation to fellow scientists seems quite relevant in an architectural context, even though it was not written for architects:

“Asimismo, nosotros los científicos del Tercer Mundo deberíamos esforzarnos por ser verdaderos creadores, para saber usar materiales autóctonos y normas conceptuales originadas en nuestros locales” (5).

Indeed, Fals Borda maintains that transferring, transplanting or simply copying academic models from “more advanced” countries, supresses creativity and impedes the developments of more effective methodologies to address the disparities, exclusions and abuses present in our nations. Clearly, in Fals Borda’s view, social scientists in the “Third World” (to use his own words) are oppressed by epistemological systems which diminish their ability to understand, and subsequently to transform, the world around them. That is why he embarks on a process of conscientização, making social scientists in Latin America aware of their situation – their position within international circuits of knowledge production – and urging them to free themselves from intellectual colonialism. In so doing, Fals Borda establishes a decolonial agenda even though decolonial discourse had not yet acquired its present form. The impact of these two publications is such that in his recent book Otro posible es posible: Caminando hacia las transiciones desde Abya Yala/Afro/Latino-America (6), Arturo Escobar credits Freire and Fals Borda as the authors of books that “estremecieron el edificio epistemico de las academias, y empezaron a labrar los cimientos para que pudieramos empezar a tomar en serio lo que hoy llamariamos ‘los conocimientos otros’ de los mundos subalternos” (7). It is in this context that I would like to situate my reading of Freire, attempting an approach from architecture, a discipline that cannot be separated from international circuits of capital and knowledge production, both of which situate Latin American practices decidedly in subaltern positions.

History and the Construction of a Discipline

Freire’s emphasis on conscientização provides an important opportunity to pursue a review of architecture from a number of different positions, questioning the methods that have been used to construct architecture as a discipline, while simultaneously reviewing the hierarchies inherent in those methods, and the absences we can uncover in its linear history. Following Freire, architects would need “to become aware” of their situation in these constructions in order to transform them. However, in order to embrace a transformational agenda, Latin American architects would have to reclaim “their right to speak” against historical constructions that see their work as derivative.

In this context, it is inevitable to link Freire’s emphasis on the right to speak to Gayatri Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (8). Although Pedagogia do Oprimido, first published in 1968, predates Spivak, the two elaborate on similar preoccupations and their arguments, underpinned by Marxist theory, identify groups of people who exist in conditions of subalternity, and whose knowledges and historical experiences – expropriation, discrimination, slavery, poverty and so on – have been ignored. The main aspect that connects the two essays, however, is the intention to bypass international circuits of labour in order also to address local and regional reproductions of colonial systems which may have developed in a separate yet interconnected fashion in order to subjugate, disqualify and render inadequate a whole range of epistemological traditions that lie outside singularly constituted colonial narratives – a phenomenon that Gonzalez Casanova calls “internal colonialism”. While the outcome in both cases is pessimistic, their insightful critiques draw attention to the existence of oppressive structures which need to be challenged, and hopefully overturned. In other words, educations is the means to make the transition from theory to action – praxis – addressing the injustices and inequalities of the world today.

Reclaiming the right to speak for Latin America architects means, amongst other things, to develop the academic methods necessary to react against the terms in which our work has been – and continues to be – inscribed in the history of architecture, and is regularly classified in publications and exhibitions. Moreover, that voice would enable a critical review of the methods we use to teach architecture in the continent. By denouncing pedagogical systems where “knowledge is bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those who they consider to know nothing” (9) Freire exhorts a transformational review of architectural education, enabling “the oppressed” to act “upon their own ideas – not consuming those of others” (10).

Fellow architects in Latin America may take offense at the suggestion that they are oppressed. After all they are members of a professional elite that has influenced the way we have lived for the past two centuries. If something, we could consider architects to be oppressors rather than oppressed. However I prefer to follow Freire who maintains that the oppressor is itself oppressed by the very prescriptions it imposes on the Other to control it, and lives in fear that once free the Other might take away their privileges (11). Indeed, in a continent where the majority of construction is carried out by non-architects, the need constantly to justify their practice reveals architects anxiety about losing their authority over the design and image of buildings and cities. Hence, in order to retain their position, architects seek support in a carefully constructed historiography that enables them to dismiss anything that does not fit the structures they have themselves created.

A case at hand could be Banister Fletcher. Much has been written about Fletcher’s “Tree of Architecture”, which traces the entire history of the discipline classifying buildings by style and by country. The tree places the European and modern North American styles/countries in the upper branches supported by the sturdy trunk of classical styles (Greek and Roman), and the so-called “non-historical” styles/countries are represented as tree suckers in the lower part of the trunk, below the mighty Greek architecture. These “non-historical” styles, as Fletcher himself put it, are separate from western art, exercised little influence on its development and “can scarcely be as interesting from an architect's point of view as those of Europe, which have progressed by the successive solution of construction problems, resolutely met and overcome” (12). As Nalbantoglu acutely sustains, the purpose of this construction is to authorise a particular tradition and to exclude others which do not fit perfectly within Fletcher’s genealogy (13). It is not my purpose here to rehearse the well-known argument about the ambivalent construction of architectural history through a simultaneous act of inclusion and exclusion, where the included Other emerges as inferior in relation to that which is constructed as the referent (14). While there are many attempts to debunk such representational methods, they remain relevant and constitute the basis for teaching of architectural history today. From William Curtis who reminds us at the start of his book on modern architecture, that he took it as his task “to discover the true path of architecture, to unearth the forms suited to the needs and aspirations of modern industrial societies, and to create the images capable of embodying the ideals of a supposedly distinct ‘modern age’” (15), to Kenneth Frampton, Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co – all of whom place the origin of modern architecture in the work of a handful of European, North American and Soviet architects – architecture has developed linearly from a centre to its peripheries. While it is comprehensible that these historians would benefit from claiming modern architecture, it is somewhat alarming that Latin American architects adopted the same principles of historical construction. For example, Ramon Gutierrez, Francisco Liernur and Enrique Browne, to mention only three influential historians in Latin America, constructed national and continental histories based on genealogies that connected architects in their countries to others in Europe and North America validating their buildings through their technical and formal similarities. The work of these historians is fundamental in the sense that they assembled, for the first time, a panoramic history of architectural practices throughout Latin America, seeking to find a place for “our” architecture in the global history of the discipline. Inadvertently, they replicated colonial epistemological structures and excluded local knowledges, as well as autochthonous forms of building and living – Fals Borda’s notion of “colonialismo intellectual” comes readily to mind.

Thus, architecture emerges as a colonising discourse whose singular true history conveys the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline while simultaneously occluding other forms of thinking, making and living. In so doing the hierarchies embedded in architectural history reassert the authority of western epistemology and dictate the terms in which we all ought to think about our buildings and our cities, ultimately dictating how we should live in them. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed instigates a “revolutionary” revision of architectural education so as to reclaim the right to speak against such dominant epistemologies.

Creativity, Architecture and Design

Let me very briefly explore the notion of domestic architecture in Colombia, the Latin American country I know best, in order to expound the argument that intellectual colonialism inhibits creativity. Colombian architects at Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, were amongst the first to explore with incremental housing schemes as well as self-construction. In the 1930s, as part of government programmes to provide adequate urban housing for a rapidly growing population. The Instituto de Credito Territorial – ICT, created in 1939, was the administrative and financial institution that enabled a critical approach to housing conditions in Colombia, with the aim of improving living conditions in rural areas. Interestingly, at the time modernising aspirations focused on “the rural”, which was seen to support industry and economic activity nationally (16). This approach was abandoned towards the end of the 1940s when the institute switches its focus to urban areas. While the narrative was decidedly colonial (17), the ICT brought together architects, planners, economists, amongst other professionals, in order to develop inter-disciplinary methodologies to tackle growing housing deficits. At the same time, the Centro de Vivienda y Planeamiento Urbano – CINVA, created in 1951, embraced modern architectural principles and ideas – such as mass production and industrialization – while also intersecting local construction knowledges and traditions, hence responding to the needs of rural-to-urban migrants and the growing working and middle-classes. CINVA also promoted community participation, and challenged the notion that marginal groups ought to be absorbed into dominant urban practices, arguing strongly that informal economies provide a framework for development. In so doing, CINVA advocated social inclusion as a fundamental planning and design practice (18).

Many of the housing schemes deigned by ICT and CINVA were the result of consultation and participation processes which supported the emergence of successful communities. Various housing models were created, but no fixed programmes were supported. Instead, architects at the time embraced ideas of incrementality and flexibility, seeing “the house” not only as a place for living, but as a space for productivity and commerce; they understood that urban housing in the specific conditions of Colombia had to contemplate multiple uses and mutation over time. Although these experiments were purely architectural, the resulting neighborhoods did not meet entirely the parameters of modern planning, and challenged narrow views of public administration. Housing with productive gardens, rental units and the possibility of extension, brought about a revolutionary reconsideration of planning practices and urban design theories. To be sure, experimental housing schemes in 1940s and 1950s Colombia challenged the notion of city desired by socio-economic elites: a homogeneous “artifact” opposed to the rural.

By the 1970s demand exceeded the capacity of the government to sustain housing schemes. The costs of urban land and construction had also increased to the point that government-sponsored institutions like ICT and CINVA were no longer able to embark on experimental practices. CINVA was dismantled in 1974 and the government retreated from social housing provision during the 1980s, liquidating ICT in 1993. After that, social housing was largely privatised and domestic architecture – at all levels: low-income, social and middle-class – has relied almost exclusively on standard formulaic fixed programmes conceived for an idealised notion of family and domesticity. Today, low-income, social and commercial housing projects revolve around the one, two or three-bedroom house (or apartment), designed in different sizes according to the market. Architects are oppressed by the market, and architectural education has focused mostly on preparing them to respond to that market efficiently. Please note that this is not a critique to contemporary Colombian architects, or their ability to design elegant, intelligent and durable buildings, according to global parameters of judgment. My critique has another purpose: to question the very notion of house, or apartment, in relation to the current needs and conditions of the entire gamut of urban residents in Colombian who are by no means a homogeneous mass.

In her outstanding doctoral thesis, architect Angela Franco maintains that housing policy in Colombia reproduces marginality by ignoring the realities of the beneficiaries who are conceived as an undifferentiated mass of “poor” people. The two or three-bedroom houses offered by government institutions to forcefully displaced people in Colombia, for example, are assigned under strict conditions that no commercial activity can be undertaken in the house, and extensions are not allowed. Failure to comply with these conditions could lead to expropriation. As such, rural-to-urban “forced migrants” are prevented from generating an income in the only property they have – having lost their home somewhere else due to violence. The size of the house is so small, that most families live in crowded conditions, but no extensions are permitted either. It does transpire that a housing scheme conceived to assist forcefully displaced populations, reproduce poverty, exclusion and violence (19). Neither practicing architects, nor schools of architecture, seem capable of engaging critically with questions about housing for the poor in Colombia today (20).

At this point, we can return safely to Freire who argues repeatedly that the banking system of education hinders creativity. The banking system of education in architecture is one that takes as true the narrow linear history of architecture we receive. An educational system that keeps uncritically revisiting ad Infinitum the buildings of a generation modernist architects in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s will not be able to instigate conscientização (21).

My recent experience attending architectural and urban history lectures at various schools in Bogota and Cali, has been that of a small circle of practitioners reciting verbatim descriptions of buildings, biographies and even anecdotes of the most famous architects of the 1950s and 1960s. The reverence shown to modernist architects is well deserved, but why can their work not be reviewed critically from a contemporary perspective? Why can that extraordinary body of work not be examined in the light of current discourses and theories which would, in fact, enable architects to be as creative as their masters were but in response to current issues?

Such narrow view of architecture, as a discipline sustained by a linear historiography that excludes the diverse historical experiences of our heterogeneous populations and the urban reality of our cities, could not entertain the possibility of new explorations, or the search for innovative responses to present realities. I have argued elsewhere that creativity and innovation require a departure from established practices, and neither is possible if the aim continues to be finding a place in a history written by others (22).

Collective Revolutionary Practice and Public Space in Cali, Colombia

When I was preparing this chapter, Colombia experienced a prolonged national strike which, unusually, had Cali (instead of Bogota) as the epicentre of the protests. The strike happened after a year of repeated quarantines and lockdowns, when people were in fear of Covid-19. As it is often the case, the strike disrupted the traffic, affected businesses – already suffering due to the pandemic – and caused damages to public property. Protests were meant to be peaceful, but quickly led to violence. In some uncanny way, the book that I was reading, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, materialise in the strike, which is why I decided to include a few comments. The national strike offered a space for the emergence of voices that had seldom been heard – or at least not that loud – while also giving dramatic visibility to the conflict between the oppressor (the socio-economic elites) and the oppressed (the poor, the indigenous and the Black) in Colombia.

During the strike, which started on the 28th of April and continued until the end of June (2021), members of the working class, indigenous collectives and other minority groups demonstrated against a long-standing oppressive system. They appropriated streets, disrupted traffic junctions and occupied public spaces (parks, squares, civic buildings etc.). They also performed symbolic acts such as erasing the names of Spanish conquistadors and renaming urban spaces using indigenous names. The central government responded by deploying tanks on the streets of Cali and Bogota, as well as helicopters to pursue protestors. In Cali, residents of one of the city’s more affluent neighbourhoods, civilians, went to the streets and shot at protestors with fire arms. Other affluent residents rammed indigenous people with their cars. Concealing the fundamental cause of the demonstrations – sustained inequality, injustice and discrimination – the government and socio-political elites, which intersect largely, emphasised the fortuitous nature of the act, and denied engagement with the concrete reality of exploitation: the historical violence against which the protestors demonstrated and wished to change. Freire describes this familiar situation thus:

“The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn, logically from their point of view, ‘the violence of a strike by workers and can call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting the strike down” (23).

In Colombia, the elites did not only call upon the state to exercise violence on the demonstrators, but also took maters in their own hands brutally to end the demonstration by killing the demonstrators; by dehumanising the indigenous, the Black, and the poor.

Given the complex nature of the events, and the difficulty to obtain reliable information about the different factions that participated, or the orders given by government, the military and the police as well as dissident groups, I will concentrate on one single act: the deposition of the statue of Sebastian de Belalcazar by a group of indigenous Misak on the forst day of the strike. Belalcazar is the Spanish conquistador credited with the foundation of Cali in 1536. The statue was made in 1937 by Victorio Macho, a Spanish sculptor who lived briefly in Colombia during the Franco dictatorship and found work in the Americas by virtue of being European. This symbolic act was carried out in order to bring awareness to the fact that the foundation of cities in the 16th century converted Colombia’s indigenous populations into minorities that continue to be discriminated against today.

Subsequently, between 26th May and 13th June 2021, a new monument was erected by protestors at a junction in a deprived area of the city. The new sculpture was collectively produced resembling a hand that holds the word “resist”, which is why it became known as Monumento a la resistencia. Unlike Belalcazar’s state sponsored statue, conceived by a single, male, formally trained, European sculptor, the new monument was co-produced by anonymous artists, engineers and volunteer builders, with donations in kind from the general public. It stands to represent the unwritten histories of Indigenous people and the histories of slavery so firmly attached to a region whose wealth derives from the cultivation of sugar cane since the 17th century.

Cali’s white-mestizo elite condemned the Misak for desecrating the image of the founder as an “act of vandalism” and expressed their rejection of the new monument, demanding its demolition. Although the local government has declined the request, this conflict reveals the prevalence of colonial structures in today’s society: a desire to oppress minorities and to silence their voices by any means necessary. I maintain that the violence assigned to the indigenous Misak is an expression of indignation by the dominant white-mestizo elite who see their authority debased, and their socio-historical standing threatened. As a result, they seek to re-assert their dominant position by exercising violence against the indigenous, destroying the newly erected symbol of resistance against oppression. One of Freire’s potent statements comes readily to mind, “to glorify democracy and to silence people is a farce” (24). On the other hand, both the toppling of Belalcazar statue, and the erection of a collectively built 10-metre-tall hand, are revolutionary acts in the best spirit of Freire’s pedagogy: their purpose is to bring conscientização. Both are unquestionable decolonial acts from below whose aim is to change Colombian society radically.

The idea that a monument built in order to celebrate the foundation of a city by a European conquistador, indeed a statue designed by a single, white, male, traditionally trained artist, has been replaced by a collectively built sculpture which does not fit perfectly within academic parameters of artistic judgment, serves as a fundamental precedent to review the terms in which we approach urban and architectural judgment. It unveils the presence of history, and why historical singularity is both oppressive and exclusive. If Freire wrote from a position of privilege in order to bring conscientização about conditions of inequity, exclusion and exploitation – as well as the passivity of the oppressed due to their lack of awareness – the group anonymous artists who erected the “monumento a la resistencia” demonstrate that his message has transgressed socio-economic and geographical boundaries. It now needs to penetrate architectural discourse. It is my contention that careful analysis of the case serves to underpin an assessment of architectural pedagogy in Colombia, through an experience that intersects the lives of many people across Latin America. I set out to attempt an approach to Freire from architecture but ended showing how Freire’s pedagogical revolution is possible, and how the very heterogeneity of the city has already begun to force a radical assessment of hitherto unquestioned concepts, such as: architect, city, public space, monument and home.

notes

1
Interestingly, in the English version of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed the word conscientização is not translated. There seems to be no direct translation of this term from Portuguese into English. The closest expression, “to come to consciousness”, refers to the process through which a person becomes aware of her/himself and the world around. In the case of Freire, conscientização is a fundamental need, especially for oppressed populations which must become aware of their situation in order to change it.

2
These are by no means the only groups referenced in the book. Freire refers to men and women, to rural and urban groups and to class differences as well. FREIRE, Paulo [1970]. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London, Penguin Classics, 2017.

3
In the sense that he never participated in armed combat, yet, along with other urban theorists during the second half of the twentieth century, including David Harvey and Eric Swyngedouw, amongst others, revolution is conceptually the only route fully to transform the deep structures that cause and sustain inequality.

4
One could also include Enrique Dussel’s series Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, but I will limit my analysis to these two Fals Borda and Galeano. DUSSEL, Enrique. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Córdoba/Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI Editores, 1973; BORDA, Orlando Fals. Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual. Mexico, Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1970; GALEANO, Eduardo. Las venas abiertas de America Latina. Madri, Siglo XXI Editores, 1971.

5
BORDA, Orlando Fals. Op. cit., p. 98.

6
ESCOBAR, Arturo. Otro posible es posible: Caminando hacia las transiciones desde Abya Yala/Afro/Latino-America. Bogotá, Ediciones Desde Abajo, 2018.

7
Idem, ibidem, p. 120.

8
Freire’s emphasis on the right to speak to Gayatri Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. SPIVAK, Gayatri. Can the Subaltern Speak? In NELSON, Cary; GROSSBERG, Lawrence (org.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London, Macmillan, 1988.

9
FREIRE, Paulo [1970]. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (op. cit.)., p. 45.

10
Idem, ibidem, p. 81.

11
Idem, ibidem, p. 19-22.

12
FLETCHER, Banister. A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for the Student Craftsman, and Amateur. 16th edition. London, B. T. Batsford, 1954, p. 888. For a comprehensive critique of Fletcher’s representation of architectural history see BAYDAR, Glsm. Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher's "History of Architecture". Assemblage, n. 35, 1998, p. 6-17.

13
Please note that Fletcher constructs the genealogy, it is not naturally there. It does not represent things “as they really are”. I will return to this latter point in Freire.

14
I wrote extensively about this ambivalent operation in HERNÁNDEZ, Felipe. Bhabha for Architects. London/New York, Routledge 2010.

15
CURTIS, William [1982]. Modern Architecture since 1900. London, Phaidon, 2000, p. 11.

16
See ROMERO SÁNCHEZ, S. La historia olvidada de la arquitectura en Colombia: La vivienda rural y la modernización durante la República Liberal. Dearq, n. 29, 2021, p. 28-39.

17
Original documents of the institute describe rural-to-urban migrants, as well as the working and middle classes, as morally deviant and ignorant people in need of an education to become adapted to urban life. In this light, the role of architecture, and the architect, was to provide ‘the kind of housing’ needed to civilise those populations.

18
See PEÑA RODRÍGUEZ, Martha L. El programa Cinva y la acción comunal: construyendo ciudad a través de la participación comunitaria. Bogota, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010.

19
Franco-Calderón, A. M. The Production of Marginality: Paradoxes of Urban Planning and Housing Policies in Cali, Colombia. Doctoral Thesis. Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 2020.

20
And the seems to be no interest to challenge the one, two, or three-bedroom apartment formula for those working in the private housing market.

21
It is true that this period marked the most significant urban transformation we have seen in Colombian architecture, and the work of this generation of architects was extraordinary, but more than half a century has passed and socio-economic conditions and technical possibilities have changed, just as the very nature of the urban is now different in Colombia.

22
See Hernandez, Felipe. Modern Fetishes, Southern Thoughts. Dearq, n. 29, 2021, p. 40-53.

23
FREIRE, Paulo [1970]. Op. cit., p. 51.

24
Idem, ibidem, p. 64.

about the autor

Felipe Hernández teaches at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridg, where he serves as Director of the Centre for Latin America Studies and as Director of Studies at King’s College. Hernández is the author of two monographs: Beyond Modernist Masters (Birkhauser, 2009) and Bhabha for Architects (Routledge, 2010), and the editor of Transculturations (Rodopi 2005); Rethinking the Informal City (Berghahn 2010), Marginal Urbanism (CSP, 2017); and the forthcoming Spatial Concepts for decolonizing the Americas with Fernando Luiz Lara (CSP, 2022).