The Nature of Space in the Americas: Realizing a Non-Eurocentric and Non-Anthropocentric Theory or Theories for Architecture and Urbanism.

This essay explores recent scholarship devoted to decolonizing theories of architecture and urbanism and focuses on how alternative perspectives of the relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world can help build other, more inclusive, intellectual frameworks for understanding cultural landscapes. It argues that recognizing the patterns of spatial occupation of the Americas by various Indigenous peoples prior to colonization is a useful first step towards moving outside obstinate ways of knowing and shaping the world. The essay begins by challenging the names of things, since stepping outside Eurocentricism and anthropocentricism requires renaming and, consequently, reconceiving many things. Notably, the word nature must be dismantled as an inherently Eurocentric concept. For example, this essay describes how thinking differently about how Indigenous peoples manipulated the plants and animals around them to produce food and other useful materials can lead to other ways of thinking about urbanism. Finally, this essay explores the tendency of Eurocentric theories in many disciplines to be anthropocentric (as opposed to anthropomorphic) and to associate colonization and its dark side, modernism, with the inevitable, progressive improvement of humankind.