Two Different Worlds: The advent of corporate modernity in San Nicolaas, Aruba

Description

What does it mean to be modern in the Global South, and who gets to decide? This event examines how large-scale modernization and extraction projects imposed from above were lived, contested, and reappropriated from below, drawing from cases in the Venezuelan Amazon and the Dutch Caribbean.

Situated at the intersection of urban history, decolonial theory, and spatial analysis, both contributions interrogate the material and social legacies of extractive and developmental capitalism across the Americas. Together, they respond to the Critical Environments platform’s effort to decenter urbanism from city-centric concerns and to confront the hidden externalities of dominant spatial development models – including those forms of extractivism, exploitation, and appropriation that persist long after formal colonialism ended. How does imposed modernity become lived modernity? What forms of resistance, negotiation, and hybrid world-making emerge in the face of spatial projects designed without, and often against, local communities? And what does it mean, from the Global South, to think otherwise about development, extraction, and the futures of landscapes still bearing their marks?

Period	26 Mar 2026
Held at	Urban Design