Research
My current research offers a social-architectural history of post-disaster reconstruction, demonstrating how grassroots practices such as self-build housing and informal land settlement have interacted with state and corporate-led rebuilding. Based on a study of post-cyclone reconstruction in Mauritius during the transition from plantation colony to independence, I use archival research, oral history, maps 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 these 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.
This new work, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is a geographical departure from my PhD research on post-war London's 'rented rooms' but shares many of the same concerns - as well as a reading of works by individual 'experts' who crossed between London and Mauritius - with how buildings and landscapes are variously laid claim to, cleared away, and reappropriated during periods of large-scale reconstruction. Bridging architectural history, cultural history and social history, my work draws on visual and material culture, oral history and analysis of records such as valuation lists, rent tribunals and registers of the dispalced to track the contested occupation, adaptation and re-use of built spaces over time.
Research grants
Architectures of Disaster Reconstruction in Mauritius, 1945-82
LEVERHULME TRUST (UK)
October 2022 - January 2026