A chapter by Beatriz Serrazina: Building the Fringes of Empire - Mining Companies, Transnational Experts, Race and Space in Colonial Africa

Beatriz Serrazina, Assistant Researcher at DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte, has published the chapter ‘Building the Fringes of Empire. Mining Companies, Transnational Experts, Race and Space in Colonial Africa' in the Routledge Critical Companion to Race and Architecture.

When organized to explore and exploit large territorial pockets, private companies became crucial scaffolds for building European Empires in Africa. The architecture of these colonial outposts, being grey and mundane, has been little explored by architectural historiography, but its impact on the ground seems paramount to understanding the spatial footprint built throughout the 20th century to manage race, labour and power relationships. Mining company towns and workers’ villages insightfully picture how difference – between race, class and gender – was spatialised through various building politics, protocols and materials; yet, since architects were often absented from these ‘fringes of empires’, it is the critical role played by engineers, doctors and local workforce on space design that remains to be acknowledged.

This article surveys mining settlements and corporative policies in Central Africa to question the many uses and impacts of race in spatial planning and expertise. It argues that space produced under colonial rule was far more complex than dualities show and explores whether and how racialised epistemologies were at the foundation of these landscapes.

The publication is available here