Methods and Approaches

As an interdisciplinary research group, we rely on sets of expertise, knowledge and a variety of methods and approaches

• Socio-historical reconstructions from various archives
• Language, discourse and visual analysis
• Oral history and qualitatively designed interviews

Socio-historical reconstructions from various archives

We have garnered a variety of material from offices of colonial planning, ministries responsible for housing, from city councils, archives of private plantations, or from mining companies, trade and agricultural unions’ archives, private papers such as memoirs of colonial officers and white settlers, or private correspondence between colonial officers and others. Government documents such as development plans, economic surveys, statistical abstracts and reports from various commissions also provide us with vital information. Moreover, we use data from international development agencies with a focus on housing (such as Site and Service Schemes) supported by grants from aid agencies (e.g. World Bank, UN-Habitat). We analyse available visual material such as photographs, (master) building plans and drawings as we are keen to understand how in terms of visual arrangements housing assumed meaning for different segments of society.

Language, discourse and visual analysis

We analyse language usage or the communicative practices and strategies used to gain or retain power over workers, which authorities used to enforce decisions, but also strategies of resistance used by workers. Communication processes such as negotiations concerning the planning of a housing site, the access to it or rules for workers in a compound are enacted verbally and/or in written form. How did colonizers and later independent governments actually communicate with the many illiterate workers? In which form were the results of these negotiations eventually worded or expressed in symbols? Which definatory powers can be observed by analysing announcements, protocols, regulations etc.?  With Critical Discourse Analysis, the Grammar of Visual Design, and the investigation of icons, indexes and symbols we aim to work out how language in its broadest sense was used to (de)stabilize or establish power relations between the players. While discourse analysis allows us to reveal players’ strategies on the basis of written sources, visual analysis allows us to go beyond textual limit(ation)s and to read images. 

Oral history and qualitatively designed interviews

We rely on oral history collections as far as they have been recorded, archived or published, literary production such as novels, autobiographies and travel accounts.We turn to oral history, or qualitatively designed interviews at strategically important points especially where archival holdings, texts and photographs need to be put into perspective. We identify, in close cooperation with our local research partners, players and groups such as town planners, local administrations, civil servants etc., who and which have been involved in building houses, implementing policy and – most importantly – who have lived and dwelled in the ‘outcomes’ of policy and building activities. We conduct qualitative interviews with the (former) workers and their dependants - those who were confronted with and who actually ‘received’ structures and plans from those exercising administrative power.