[Global South, critical regionalism, architectural imagery, landscapes of impatient capital, radical balance, sanctioned ignorance, south-south cooperation, policy governance, climate-adaptive knowledge, material sovereignty, adaptive resilience, active ownership, community collectives, built culture, regional individualism, behavior amendment campaigns, pseudo-control, post-colonial nations, contemporary engineered materialism, spatial gluttony, local designs, tangible solution, intelligent interplay, realignment of built fabric]
Globally, the act of ‘building’ has largely been a result of eco-social patterns, regulated predominantly through cash flow, and ‘phygitally’ propagated behavior amendment campaigns. Long before the Brandt Line [1] delineated the world’s landmass into ‘top-bottom’ categories, noted social activist Carl Oglesby had discussed this imposed hierarchy, arguing in his 1969 article for the Commonweal magazine that “the war in Vietnam was the culmination of a history of northern dominance over the Global South.” [2]
It is hardly anecdotal that this invisible puppeteering extends far beyond violent geopolitics—in today’s contemporaneity, it is omnipresent. To put things in context—more of what we call ‘built’ in the Global South has been constructed on principles and aesthetic standards, using intellectual labor and materials imported and inspired from the north.
A recent article on ArchDaily explains one of the avenues of this pseudo-control: “Historical precedents show examples of governments turning to foreign architects for development work, inviting them to design their country’s most famous structures. Western architects were frequently commissioned to design landmark projects in the Global South, particularly in post-colonial nations seeking to declare their new identities through architecture.” [3]
While identity is multi-dimensional and changes with lived and perceived experiences, it is more than hypothetical to state that centuries of influence have had a lasting impact on the built environment of the Global South. Why else do we find cities and capitals of nations south of the Equator decorated with towers of steel and glass, their conditioned interiors mimicking a standardized capitalist landscape? And while we have loosely agreed to this framework, I am compelled to ask—does this classification rest solely on the awry definition of poverty as a lack of financial and entrepreneurial resources?
The answer is, mostly, yes. And the Global South has largely accepted this imposition of misplaced aspiration. The resultant effect on the built form is a gradual shift from critical regionalism to a globalized regularity of designs and materials: the gradual imposition of architectural imagery predominantly from the north-west! This widespread phenomenon has been termed “landscapes of impatient capital” [4] by architect Rahul Mehrotra, where every city aspires to be like New York or Dubai! This is the death of regional individualism in the built culture as we know it.
Stitching the diverse south into a unitary whole is challenging, urging us to strip architecture to its fundamental unit—a standalone house for an average family. This unit thrives in a tropical-temperate climate with humid summers, dry winters, and incessant rains. The home’s users relish the morning sun and winter chill, while children enjoy running on the courtyard grass and splashing in the kalboishakhi*!
A design of isolation may work in the global north but fails in the south. Glass towers and polished glazing shine in New York or London but struggle in Mumbai. The south thrives on co-existence and harmony with nature.
I believe in Le Corbusier’s statement to support this argument— “a house is a machine for living in.” A Splendor, an exceptional city bike will lose its functionality in the high altitudes of Ladakh due to the thin air. A Himalayan, which is not particularly suitable for city use, will excel effortlessly in this geography. Just as machines require contextual specificity, buildings too need to be designed with sensitivity to their surroundings to produce the best possible output—an honorable quality of life. In the Global South, buildings must adapt to the local climate, accommodating wind, rain, expansion, and contraction. An isolationist design will not provide an optimal solution in these regions.
As such, the call is simple. LET Buildings BREATHE. Again!
This is neither a passionate outburst of nostalgia nor a cry for complete disregard. Instead, it is a call for a “radical balance” [5] — a realignment of the built fabric through investments in finding the minimal viable plans with the maximum potential output. This protest is against the idea that modernity means imposing foreign aspirations through agencies of capital and power, promoting enforced isolation from place and culture through rigid, airlocked boundaries.
The bottom line is—how do we reclaim a fabric that responds to the lifestyles and sovereignty of the Global South in a humane manner, one that is “capable of protecting people not by exclusion but by embrace?” [6]
The tangible solution is an intelligent interplay between our traditional indigeneity and contemporary engineered materialism! The crisp new must pair with the matured intelligence of centuries of climate-adaptive knowledge, breathing life back into the built environments of the South. We have all been blinded by the ‘American dream’, equating success to spatial gluttony, sidelining the cultural and environmental impacts of such uninformed choices. This “sanctioned ignorance” [7] and acute lack of willingness to preserve the indigenous is a looming threat to architecture, design, and urbanism today, creating a panorama of bland, apathetic homogeneity. Perhaps this was foreshadowed by Catherine Belsey— “the structuralist danger of collapsing all differences.” [8]
The call to make buildings porous will save users’ carbon footprints and provide the community of architects the opportunity to brainstorm new design adaptations for passive engagement with the four horsemen of nature—earth (seismic activity), water (rain and flood), air (storms and tempest), and fire (sun and wildfire)! Additionally, it is crucial to mobilize local groups to reclaim their neighborhoods through community collectives. Activating local pockets of knowledge and influence will be pivotal in this process of re-democratization. The UN South-South Cooperation [9] desk is one of the agencies that can vanguard this change in partnership with national governments and regional citizen groups. There is ample evidence emerging from the field demonstrating the incompatibility of ideas imported from the north into the Global South. It is imperative that this misaligned development is rectified through policy governance at the highest levels of global intelligentsia and statutory regulation at the grassroots of the Global South.
We must steer clear of the rigid top-to-bottom hierarchy and instead foster a culture of active ownership among the grassroots communities. By providing policy incentives, we can empower them to make better purchasing decisions. It is imperative that we adopt the bottom-to-top strategy to shape the larger fabric of the built south! The 21st Century is the peri-urban building itself, and caution is strongly recommended.
Four key performance indicators in this re-evolution would be weather empathy, local designs, material sovereignty and adaptive resilience.
We urgently require a profound redefinition of architectural praxis in the Global South. Change is a formidable adversary, yet relentless resistance against the exploitative chains that sever communities from their cultural heritage is imperative. Imagine if even a fraction of the billions of households in the Global South embraced this transformative vision—rejecting insulation for breathability, dependence for sovereignty, and staticity for evolution, the result would be a seismic paradigm shift: a built environment that heals, empowers, and thrives. In doing so, we reclaim architectural dignity rooted in local wisdom. These will not merely be homes; they will be powerful acts of liberation, deeply humane, and profoundly acquiescent.
While making America great again largely depends on one single individual, letting buildings breathe again is a shared goal—designed, implemented, and maintained by the regional identities of the Global South. And while “hope is not a strategy”, [10] creating breathable surfaces is a far more attainable goal than readjusting the polished crown atop the head of the global north!
*Kalboishakhi is Bengali for Nor’wester—a severe, localized thunderstorm event occurring predominantly on humid and hot afternoons in/around the Bengal basin of South Asia.
CITATIONS
Brandt, Willy. “North-South: A Programme for Survival; Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues.” Independent Commission on International Development Issues, 1980. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000039496.
Adetunji, Jo. “The Global South is on the rise – but what exactly is the Global South?” The Conversation UK, 2023. https://theconversation.com/the-global-south-is-on-the-rise-but-what-exactly-is-the-global-south-207959
Gattupalli, Ankitha. “Globalization and Architecture: The Dependency on Foreign Talent in the Global South.” ArchDaily, 2025. https://www.archdaily.com/1028064/globalization-and-architecture-the-dependency-on-foreign-talent-in-the-global-south
Mehrotra, Rahul. “Instruments of Advocacy”. Architecture X Media Studies, The Better Architecture Project, 2025. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LP3LLGNokscAbMpS2hPUq
Modak, Shubhayan. “Radical Balance”. Architecture X Media Studies, The Better Architecture Project, 2025. Upcoming.
“Trade and Development Report 2023”. United Nation Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva, 2024. https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tdr2023_en.pdf
Spivak, Gayatri C. “Selected Subaltern Studies”. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988. https://ia801403.us.archive.org/7/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.99309/2015.99309.Selected-Subaltern-Studies_text.pdf
Belsey, Catherine. “Literature, History, Politics.” Literature and History, Volume 9, 1983.
“South-South Cooperation in a Digital World.” United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation, 2018. https://www.unsouthsouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Final-Report.pdf
Hayes, Sonny. “F1 The Movie.” Warner Bros Pictures & Apple Original Films, 2025. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16311594/