Reviews of my practice and research work in academic and popular press publications.
My work has been reviewed in several academic and popular press publications. Below, I list and describe some of those reviews (in reverse chronological order).
Anika Jain, “Amherst’s Gabriel Arboleda Argues Against the Notion of Sustainable Development,” The Justice, December 6, 2022, https://www.thejustice.org/article/ 2022/12/amhersts-gabriel-arboleda-argues-against-the-notion-of-sustainable- development-brandeis.
This article by Anika Jain in The Justice offers the author’s take on a lecture I delivered at Brandeis University on the complicated subject of sustainability advocacy vis-à-vis social class privilege. The article provides a good summary of the case of Social Urbanism in Medellín, Colombia, which I used to make my point in the talk. The article also gives a fair description of what I propose to address the often-unnoticed disconnection between green design advocacy and social inequality (exemplified by a popular belief, in architectural practice, that problems of poverty can be solved with good design). Ultimately, in that lecture, and as in some of my written work, I argued against the notion of sustainability being invoked to justify the oppression of other people and to continue to do business as usual under the guise of “green business.”
Christina Mahut, “The Image of the Indigene and Semiotics: Cultural Ventriloquism,” Race + Space (blog), October 16, 2020, https://www.mcgill.ca/race-space/article/ reading-lists-week-14/image-indigene-and-participatory-design-0.
Aamirah Nakhuda, “Pawns on the Chessboard,” Race + Space (blog), October 16, 2020, https://www.mcgill.ca/race-space/article/reading-group-contributors-week-14/ image-indigene-and-participatory-design.
Race + Space is a blog project hosted at McGill University. The main goal of this project is educational, focusing particularly on anti-racist education in architectural design, housing, and other space-based disciplines. One of the topics explored by this blog, “The Image of the Indigene and Participatory Design,” is devoted to the issue of representation in participatory design practice. The two entries above, authored by Christina Mahut and Aamirah Nakhuda, carefully analyze the paper “Beyond Participation,” which I published in the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). The two authors place this paper in conversation with other academic perspectives on issues of cultural appropriation, cultural ventriloquism, authenticity, and identity in architectural design and planning practice.
Read the articles:
Mahut 2020
Nakhuda 2020
Bruno Demers, “Ethnographie et Architecture: De la Parole au Geste” [Ethnography and architecture: from words to action], Esquisses 27, no. 4, 2016–2017, 48–51.
This is a piece written by Bruno Demers for Esquisses, the magazine of the Order of Architects of Québec, which is the main architect’s association in this Canadian province. This issue of the magazine, published in the winter of 2016, focuses on the importance of adopting cultural identity considerations in the practice of architecture. Demers studies three different approaches to incorporating ethnographic ethics into architectural practice: those of sociologist Galen Cranz from U.C. Berkeley, anthropologist Viktoria Walldin from architectural firm White Arkitekter, and my own approach. Describing the latter, Demers includes an eight-principle breakdown I usually make of my method of work. He playfully calls this set of principles the “Ethnoarchitecture Charter,” parodying the modernist term “Athens Charter.”
Read the article:
Original version (French)
English translation
Myrna Breitbart, “Participatory Action Research,” in Key Methods in Geography, third edition, ed. Nicholas Clifford, Meghan Cope, Thomas Gillespie, and Shaun French (London: SAGE, 2016), 205–206.
Part of a comprehensive book on research methods, Myrna Breitbart’s chapter focuses on one such method, participatory action research (PAR). The chapter offers the Guyana Hinterland Housing project as an example of the use of PAR in general and, in particular, of the PAR technique of social mapping. To illustrate how PAR principles informed this housing project, box 13.3, “Participatory Research on Housing in the Guyana Hinterland,” explains the steps I followed in the project’s participatory process and the outcomes that the use of a PAR-informed approach helped to achieve.
Pauline McHardy and Michael Donovan, The State of Social Housing in Six Caribbean Countries (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 2016).
In the process of describing current (as of 2016) housing policy in Guyana, Pauline McHardy and Michael Donovan’s book mentions the piece of policy that made possible the Hinterland Housing project. Their book also briefly describes the outcomes of that project up to the date of publication (when we had completed just over 200 houses). It also describes how the project became a model for a housing pilot that the government of Suriname later implemented following the operating regulations of the Guyana project, which I wrote.
Project descriptions in book (pp. 2, 51-52, 61, 112)
Cris Carl, “For the Brave and Eco-Conscious: Composting Toilets,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 22, 2013, 3.
This article by Cris Carl seeks to introduce the mainstream public to the notion of composting toilets. In an interview for this article, I explain the need for composting toilets, as well as the composting alternatives to standard toilets currently available for domestic use in the United States.
Amanda Kolson Hurley, “Screen Capture: Ethnoarchitecture.com, Seeing Buildings Through the Eyes of Others,” Architect Magazine, March 2007, 44.
This is a review of Ethnoarchitecture.com published in Architect Magazine. Now offline, Ethnoarchitecture.com was a database of traditional buildings from around the world, including entries on 7,300 groups and 228 countries and territories. In her review, Amanda Kolson Hurley describes this database project, the rationale behind my use of the term “ethnoarchitecture,” and my position on architectural change in traditional communities.
Javier Arbona-Homar, “Official Launch of Ethnoarchitecture.com,” Archinect, January 8, 2007, https://archinect.com/news/article/50187/official-launch-of-ethnoarchitecture-com.
In this note for Archinect, Javier Arbona-Homar reports on my formal launch of the Ethnoarchitecture.com project at the tenth conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) in Bangkok, Thailand. Arbona-Homar describes the project’s motivation: to stimulate discussion on environmental problems while discussing the potential that professionals usually see in adopting traditional architecture’s environmental alternatives for the construction industry. The main goal of the Ethnoarchitecture.com project was to engage in that discussion while also considering the socio-economic issues faced by rural traditional people worldwide— issues that affect their capacity to continue to engage in traditional construction practices.
Tom Witkowski, “$50K: Fuel Cells, Toilet in Mix,” Boston Business Journal, May 7–13, 2004, 34.
This is a report from the Boston Business Journal featuring the semifinalists of the famed MIT 50K (now 100K) Entrepreneurship Competition, including me. The report details the logic and story of my very low-tech project, a composting toilet that itself becomes compost after use. (In the end, I did not pursue this concept as a product, as I explain in the sanitation project page).