DOCUMENTOS JUSTIFICATIVOS II.– FORMACIÓN ACADÉMICA

The research looks at both collaboration and interdisciplinarity although this exploration is difficult to achieve in such a short writing space. Here, by collaboration I refer to the teamwork between two or more initiatives, organizations, and/or practitioners, or the combination between these, which work together on the implementation of the same project. The research itself employs the practice of collaboration as methodology among other methods of collecting data, not only during the primary fieldwork in Ghana but also throughout the extended fieldwork and writing-up endeavour.

The primary fieldwork entails collaboration of different levels: one among the members of our Nka Foundation group; another between the Nka Foundation group and the local

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community including the masons; and one between the Nka Foundation and the Building and Road Research Institute (BRRI), which is a local institution (see 3.3.5). All the three collaborations take place in order to implement a construction project for a small community building in rural Ghana. The value of collaboration with local actors within research in the global South is emphasized throughout the thesis, from the fieldwork in Abetenim (see chapter 4 on Abetenim) through to the secondary case studies which include initiatives, projects and organisations located in Algeria, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan (see chapter 5 Case Studies). The case studies look at the collaborative aspect of such projects and the way boundaries get affected and reshuffled through such endeavours.

Architectural critic and historian, cultural theorist, as well as the protagonist and definer of Post-Modernism, Jencks, also quoted earlier in this chapter, in an interview by The Architectural review during the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale (The Architectural review 2014), which was titled ‘Fundamentals’ and curated by Koolhaas, broached the prerequisite for making a contribution to the discipline of Architecture, arguing that the only way to make a contribution to the discipline is to rethink it from another discourse outside of it, and specifically to rethink it from culture, as he states:

“To get outside of architecture which you have to do to make a contribution of architecture, Corbusier wrote a book called, ‘If I had to teach you architecture’. If I had to teach you architecture one of the things I would say you would need a lever to change architecture and the only way you can get a lever is another discourse outside of it. You can’t just change it from within, you have to rethink it from culture.”

Here, Jencks suggests a collaboration between architecture and other disciplines which study culture(s). Cultural anthropology, for instance, studies the cultural life of humankind by employing the ethnographic method, which is descriptive and entails participant observation, participation as well as face-to-face interviews. Thus this research undertakes a collaborative exchange between architecture and ethnography in order to not only open up a dialogue which entails the continuous reconsideration, adjustment and negotiation of the boundaries of the disciplines, but also in order to be

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able to ‘see’ longer-term sustainable pathways in similar contexts, and rethink architecture from a broader cultural perspective.

The research is interested in the ways disciplines work together. Scicluna (2015) contends that the exchanges between disciplines should not blur the boundaries, but make their borders more porous. And more porous alludes to perforation in architectural thinking and imagination, which means that the discipline of architecture, in this context, allows influences from the discipline of ethnography to go through its boundaries in order to inform and enrich its content and outcome to a certain degree. In the context of the global South, can making the borders of the discipline more porous enable us to face the complexity of our global urban/rural future in a much more flexible way?

The research contends that architecture needs to ‘listen’ to and become more responsive to the needs of the people, as well as its social and environmental context; it contends that there is a need to ‘connect the dots’, as Professor of Anthropology Nader (CalTV Berkeley 2010) argues about the state of the education system today. We are a specialist nation, we go to school to become specialists and in the process we isolate ourselves, we detach our whole being from our larger context. Thus the process of connecting the dots may offer the invaluable tool and skill to think beyond the specialist knowledge of our discipline. Speaking at Architecture ZA (AZA) 2012 Biennial Festival in Cape Town (Design Indaba 2012), Ghanaian architect and educator Joe Osae-Addo highlights the need for architecture to become more receptive and aware of its users, that is the people. For him one of architecture’s drawbacks is that it is not in a harmonious alliance or partnership with the people whom they design for; unlike musicians and playwrights, who are attuned to their audience, as he describes:

“You will be surprised with the people who will inspire you; they could be musicians and playwrites because they are attuned and in tune with the people and that’s where we have to go for inspiration. And I think this is something which architecture has not been able to achieve.”

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“the differences between: ‘interdisciplinarity’, which brings multiple

disciplines together to address a specific issue or project; ‘multi- disciplinarity’, which brings multiple disciplines together, but uses them separately to shed light on a specific issue; while ‘cross-disciplinarity’ is about dialogue across disciplines” (Scicluna, 2015: 75)

In a lecture titled, “Paul Jenkins: 'Understanding urbanisation, urbanism and urbanity in African cities'” (Paul Jenkins 2013), academic and active practitioner Jenkins explores how empirical inter-disciplinary research needs to be the basis for an improved understanding of cities of the global South, through the lens of a major research programme focusing on an in-depth case study undertaken from 2009 to 2013 in Maputo, Mozambique. He argues for the need to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and to engage in inductive processes in order to find new and more relevant analytical concepts and categories so that we understand the field in a more comprehensive way, as he notes:

“I think what we need to do in a self-critical way to avoid the prejudice which underpins or potentially could underpin this but it also means going beyond disciplinary boundaries and this is how I think some of the biggest challenges are.”

Participant A4 is concerned with the increasing fragmentation of the Academy, the ‘silo mentality’ as she refers to it, drawing on the urgency to understand each other’s professions, and to get outside the box, which entails critiquing the isolation of the various disciplinary approaches, as she states:

“Obviously there’s been a lot of talk about how to get outside the box and talk to each other, out of the silos, out of the silo mentality. There should be respect for every skill involved and every discipline and people should be more used to talking to each other across disciplines.”

Moreover, Jenkins (Paul Jenkins 2013) also critiques the nature of disciplinary specialization as being increasingly fragmented and argues that the Academy stimulates

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at best some form of multi-disciplinary view, which entails bringing multiple disciplines together, but using them separately to shed light on a specific issue. Although multidisciplinary research includes more integration rather than just addition, and is able to integrate ways of thinking concepts and any challenging situation, it still does not enable the necessary dialogue which the complexity relating to development and design in the global South demands. Petrie (1992: 304) writes about interdisciplinarity that:

“Interdisciplinary research or education typically refers to those situations

in which the integration of the work goes beyond the mere concatenation of disciplinary contributions. Some key elements of disciplinarians' use of their concepts and tools change. There is a level of integration.”

Jenkins (Paul Jenkins 2013) contends that transdisciplinarity is what is needed to face the complexity of our global urban, and rural, future in a much more flexible way, as there is a strong focus on complexity, as he writes:

“I would argue that transdisciplinarity is what is needed to face the complexity of our global urban future in a much more flexible way. That’s an ability to step outside the box and rethink the nature of knowledge and conceptual analysis as part of that process of working together as well as rethinking methods. What I argue for is this concept of transdisciplinary, the idea is that we go beyond the disciplines; new approaches to a subject are sought, derive from unpacking disciplines, new knowledge is produced with aspiration to a highest common factor not a lowest common denominator and there is a strong focus on complexity.”

Petrie (1992: 304) writes about transdisciplinarity in this way:

“The notion of transdisciplinarity exemplifies one of the historically

important driving forces in the area of interdisciplinarity, namely, the idea of the desirability of the integration of knowledge into some meaningful whole. (…) Essentially, this kind of interdisciplinarity represents the impetus to integrate knowledge, and, hence, is often characterized by a

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denigration and repudiation of the disciplines and disciplinary work as essentially fragmented and incomplete.”

In short, the research recognises the need to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and to engage in empirical inductive processes in order to find new and more relevant analytical concepts and categories for a more holistic understanding of the field of the global South (Paul Jenkins 2013). Interdisciplinary collaborations are considered, that is, the ways disciplines work together and the continuous exchanges which take place between them and cause their borders to become more porous. The research argues that the syncretism between the ethnographic method and architectural research and design opens up a dialogue which entails the continuous reconsideration, adjustment and negotiation of the disciplines’ boundaries, specifically looking at the way the boundaries of the discipline of architecture are affected, and contributes to longer-term sustainable adaptation in this context. Furthermore, the research touches upon the notion of transdisciplinarity within research in this context and puts forth the idea of exploring the mutual collaboration between disciplines, which entails the necessary interdisciplinary dialogue and at the same time, and equally, empirical experiences of and in the field itself. The culmination of the above aspires to a process of rethinking existing methodological approaches, narratives and knowledge of the field(s). The aim is the integration of knowledge into some meaningful whole (Petrie, 1992). The above issues are discussed further in chapter 8.

3.3.5 The Role of Institutional Support in the Implementation of the Project: