Dr Alistair Cartwright

Research Overview

My current research offers an original social-architectural history of post-disaster reconstruction, demonstrating how grassroots practices such as self-build housing and informal land settlement interact with state and corporate-led rebuilding. Based on a case study of post-cyclone reconstruction in Mauritius during the transition from plantation colony to independence, I use archival research, oral history, drawings and photography to challenge traditional beliefs about who has agency in making the built environment. The project articulates the links between grassroots spatial practices and large-scale transformative change, questioning the fixity of categories like traditional versus modernist, local versus international, and vernacular versus mass produced.

The contemporary context for the project is the way environmental disasters, driven partly by catastrophic climate change, continue to serve as the pretext for ‘blank slate’ reconstruction programmes that exacerbate the legacy of colonial exploitation. Reacting against this tendency, critical voices from the field of humanitarian architecture have pressed for closer attention to grassroots spatial practices often deemed anathema to modern architecture. But the historically dynamic nature of grassroots spatial practices themselves, ranging from vernacular building cultures to informal land settlement, has largely eluded analysis. My project seeks to overcome these historical blindsides via a case study of post-cyclone reconstruction in the former British colony of Mauritius from 1945 to 1982. With cyclones expected to become more frequent due to climate change, my project offers an historical knowledge-base for how architects and planners can be led by grassroots responses.

This new work, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is a departure from my PhD research on post-war London's 'rented rooms' but shares some of the same concerns with how buildings and landscapes are variously laid claim to, cleared away, and reappropriated during periods of large-scale reconstruction. Sitting at the intersection of architectural history and social history, my work draws on visual culture, oral history and analysis of records such as valuation lists and postal directories to track the contested occupation, adaptation and re-use of built spaces over time.