When speaking about non-western countries in a western discourse, the term ‘development’ country or region is often used. The beginning of the development discourse is mainly marked by the second inaugural speech of US president Harry S. Truman in 1949 (Ziai, 2010). He promised to help people in "underdeveloped territories" with financial investments and by promoting technical progress to create better living conditions. The concept of development became politically powerful after the Second World War, in the context of Cold War politics and the decline of the colonial empires. The discourse also mirrors the geopolitical and economic interests of the US and their allies, namely the former European colonial powers. But similar asymmetrical patterns are also found in the aid programs of the Soviet Union with its so-called brother states.
The development discourse is highly interwoven with the concept of modernity and its conception of historical time and a past that would need to be overcome. As Johannes Fabian states in his book Time and the Other, “Space and time are ideologically constructed instruments of power.” Projecting the object of anthropology on a evolutionist timeline as “underdeveloped,” denies the existence of the coevalness of temporality and historical perspectives. Instead, the naturalization of hegemonic western time structures could therefore been seen as a way to colonize and govern the time of the Other.
But according to Aram Ziai, the concept of the post-war development discourse to colonial discourses. It can be found in documents such as the British Colonial Development Act from 1929 and throughout the French Civilizing Mission, with its origins in writings of Comte, the Saint-Simonists, Hegel, and Kant, etc. The project of civilizing the uncivilized turns into a project for “developing the underdeveloped” in the era of decolonization in the words of Aram Ziai. The development discourse still divides the globe into developed and underdeveloped countries today. This division proceeds from a universal modernization ideal that understands the historical processes of social change in Western Europe and North America (and Japan) as mankind’s historical progress. But the development of a western, modern identity as such was, as Stuart Hall put it, already dependent on the demarcation of societies that were represented as backward and different. As Ziai argues, the basic pattern derived from this figure of backwardness; thus “the development discourse can be simplified as follows: The south has problems (underdevelopment, lack of capital, technology, etc.), the north has solutions (modernization, investments, experts). To conceive other societies as backward implies the continuation of the idea of western and colonial supremacy. The own society serves as the ideal historical standard. On the basis of this standard other societies are defined as in deficit. Simultaneously to this diagnosis the therapy is implied: societies must become modern, industrialized, secular, and more productive.” (Ziai 2010)
Modernist architecture and housing projects in non-western contexts played a highly symbolic role in this shifting concept from a “civilizing” to a “developing” colonial modernity. In French North Africa, so-called culturally specific building low-rise programs were developed for Muslim workers. Hi-rise housing projects were created for the Evoluee, a local group, which, based on French ideology, spoke French, followed French laws, and usually held white-collar jobs (although rarely higher than clerks). At the moment of decolonization at the end of the Second World War, the “civilizing” discourse had already turned into a “development” discourse. The spatial and class division created with these building programs was also highlighted on propaganda films i.e. “Salut Casa” as a central process of modernization itself. The development discourse became even more dominant in high-modernist languages for new town planning after the independence movements in the global south. Many architects that had built under colonial rule were now asked to create housing projects and public buildings for the newly independent states under specially created development programs initiated by the former colonial powers. (MvO+EE)
Sources:
Bourdieu, Pierre (2003): In Algerien. Zeugnisse einer Entwurzelung. Graz: Camera Austria.
Crinson, Mark (2003): Modern Architecture and the End of Empire. Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Fabian, Johannes (1983): Time and the Other. How Antropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press.
Jameson, Frederic (2002): A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London and New York: Verso.
Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988): The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Osborne, Peter (1995): The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London and New York: Verso.
Ziai, Aram (2010): Zur Kritik des Entwicklungsdiskurs, In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, APuz 10/2010. Online Version:
http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/H4BWXP,0,Zur_Kritik_des_Entwicklungsdiskurses.html
