CFP - Drying Landscapes and Postcolonial Nation-Building

[Matthew Heins]

I've been asked to distribute the interesting CFP below, titled "Drying Landscapes and Postcolonial Nation-Building," which is for a session at the SAH Conference.

This is also a good opportunity to remind everyone of all the excellent sessions and other events at the SAH conference. Abstracts are due June 8.

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Drying Landscapes and Postcolonial Nation-Building

Session at Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Conference 2027 (Chicago, 14-18 April 2027)

Deadline: Jun 8, 2026

sah.org/conferences/chicago-2027

We invite paper proposals for the session Drying Landscapes and Postcolonial Nation-Building

This session examines how the material and conceptual “drying” of landscapes, initiated under colonial rule, has continued to shape postcolonial nation-building across the Global South and beyond. In colonial contexts, drainage schemes, flood-control projects, sanitation works, and hydraulic infrastructures produced an environmental logic to regulate, contain, and remove “water”. Implemented across diverse sites and scales, these interventions reshaped relationships between land and water, redefined what counted as orderly, modern, and governable space, and often displaced communities or erased landscapes. The session interrogates how the colonial-modern project of “drying” has continued in post-colonial conditions in which environmental logics once tied to imperial ambitions have been reactivated, reworked, or contested. It examines the persistent material and discursive divide between “contained waters” and “dry” lands, a divide central to architectural, urban, and landscape design debates, and challenges assumptions about the neutrality of hydraulic and infrastructural interventions in built and environmental contexts. 

The session situates postcolonial spatial and infrastructural transformations within longer ideological lineages. Large-scale nation-building projects such as Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, which submerged Nubian landscapes and displaced heritage and communities, demonstrate how drying and containment became symbols of sovereignty and modernization. In India, Le Corbusier’s monumental Bhakra–Nangal Dam, largely unrealized, similarly framed hydraulic infrastructure as a “temple of modernity.” Beyond dams, these dynamics extend to monumental architecture such as Louis Kahn’s Assembly Complex in Dhaka and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, as well as land reclamation, drainage, and urban flood-control projects in Lagos, Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai, where “dry,” buildable land signals economic and global-city ambitions and reinforces the wet/dry binary in postcolonial spatial logic. More recent water-restoration projects, such as Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Stream, reproduce similar dynamics by aestheticizing and disciplining water within a newly designed spatial regime. 

By foregrounding environmental imaginaries and infrastructural regimes, this session aims to explore methodologies for studying the history of the built environment beyond the wet/dry divide. It seeks to rethink architectural history through the entangled politics of water, landscape, and spatial modernity. We welcome papers from all geographic regions and across colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Abstracts must be under 300 words, and the title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style. The submission should also include a two-page CV in PDF format.

Submissions and further info: https://sah.org/conferences/chicago-2027/call-for-papers-2027-annual-international-conference/

For inquiries, please contact:

Labib Hossain (Assistant Professor, Miami University) - hos...@miamioh.edu

Farhan Karim (Associate Professor, Arizona State University) - farhan...@asu.edu