The Region: Architectural Histories of a Naturalized Concept

Organized by
Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió
Ayala Levin

Introduction: Region, or, Terms of Relation • Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió and Ayala Levin

Typologizing Difference

The Ecological Uncanny: Thinking with a Mobile Region • Swati Chattopadhyay

Basic Shelters—Pioneering Regionalism in Palestine, 1930s–1940s* • Martin Hershenzon

After the Region: Building the Bioregional Paradigm* • Pamela Karimi

The Fifth South Pacific Conference in Pago Pago, American Samoa: Fale, Territoriality, and Islander Solidarity • Kelema Lee Moses

Inventing the “Cold Regions”* • Phoebe Springstubb

Conveyor-Belt Urbanism: Architecture and Regionalization during the First Soviet Five-Year Plan • Alla Vronskaya

Affective Translations

Albany at the Crossroads of a Strategic Region • Daniel M. Abramson

Engineering the “Unity of the Nile Valley,” 1947* • Samaa Elimam

Lawrence Halprin’s Sea Ranch Scores • Patricia A. Morton

The Region as a Mode of Statecraft • Micah Rutenberg and Avigail Sachs

Scaling Relations

Fluid Frontiers • Seçil Binboğa

Cultivating “the Region”: Territory, Nationality, and Lines in the Soviet Landscape, ca. 1930* • James Graham

How to Mobilize the Rural? Regional Planning in the United States (1935), Sierra Leone (1965), and Tanzania (1979–83)* • Ayala Levin

What is Regional about Critical Regionalism? Questions of National-Statism, Indigenous Politics, and Global Capital • Ginger Nolan

The Ruhr Coal District Settlement Association: Weimar-Era Regional Planning as a Governance Model • Anna Vallye

Technologies of Inscription

Inventing the Fertile Crescent: The Chicago Oriental Institute, Prehistory, Biopolitics, and the Making of a Region • Can Bilsel

Re-Tooling Regionalism: Architecture, Ethnography, and Technology in France, 1940–45* • Gregory Cartelli

The Testimony of the Weeds* • Albert Narath

Settling the Murray* • Laila Seewang

The International Indigenous Craftsman Style: Racialization and Regionality from the Cahuilla Nation to The Philippines* • Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió and Diana Martinez

(*) Forthcoming in the project’s second installment.

The intellectual genealogies of the region, including specific discourses of design since the late eighteenth century, contributed to the concept’s reification as a natural entity. A historical interrogation of regionality as a set of techniques intimately associated with the nation-state shows how the region’s ambivalences are rooted in the state’s genealogy as a product of both modern colonialism and the emergence of capitalism.