Book Review on Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958-1973 (Levin, 2022)

Abstract

In the contexts of decolonization and Cold War, the postcolonial Global South was a contested zone with fierce competition among various donors over development aid, in which the architectural aid constituted the backbone. The existing studies of the postcolonial built environment still tend to be weighed towards the two-way flows of people, institutions, things and knowledges between the South and either former Euro-American metropole or socialist Eastern-bloc, while a third category of emerging aid donors, such as China, Japan, South Korea or Brazil, seems largely peripheral to these studies. Ayala Levin's (2022) Architecture and Development is thus a valuable contribution to this scholarship by providing a novel narrative of a much less-researched donor through the lens of architecture, i.e. how Israel, which positioned itself as a fellow postcolonial developing country, turned its settler colonial experience into a new global development expertise that could be exported to the decolonizing South.