CRUNCH: Depth and Belonging

What does it mean to belong, and consequently, to belong no more? In the myriad ways in which belonging is sown into imagination and law, from claims of lineage to property, one significant path is how the ideas of self are related to land.

In the late nineteenth century, the British colonial government embarked on developing a new “cotton belt” in the southern Sindh desert (in present-day Pakistan). This ambitious enterprise sought to counter the dwindling supply of US cotton after the Civil War by cutting expansive canals on flat desert land. The real challenge lay not in the engineering itself, but in attempting to redefine what land and belonging meant.

Entire villages – including that of Ijlal Muzaffar’s family – were transplanted from the north to the desert along new canals to grow new crops and undercut the political power of local pirs (saints) by displacing their followers. Over half a century, rebellions repeatedly emerged and were brutally suppressed each time, revealing competing understandings of land and depth.

In this contested landscape, depth became a site of resistance and control. Scottish engineers calculated coefficients to keep silt particles suspended in the new canals. Rebel horsemen hid in dust storms to move invisibly past army strongholds. Widows swallowed land deeds to disrupt colonial property transfer.

In charting these stories of settlement and displacement, Muzaffar argues that in theatres of belonging and displacement, it is not just the regimes of surface and visibility – maps, property, systems of taxation and water distribution – that determine legitimacy, but modes of giving meaning to depth.

Depth figures as an epistemology of the hidden, enabling invisible continuities between land and the various selves that seek to inhabit it.

With responses from Nishat Awan and chaired by Catalina Ortiz.

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Please note this event has limited capacity and operates on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors close at 18:40.

Ijlal Muzaffar is Professor of Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He is the author of Modernism's Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital (University of Texas Press, 2024) and the co-editor of the volume Architecture in Development Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). His work has been published widely in academic journals, museum and biennale catalogues and edited volumes.

Nishat Awan is an architect whose work focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration, and borders. Her research and practice bring together digital, ethnographic, and field-based approaches in often contested geographies. She is Professor of Architecture and Visual culture at UCL Urban Laboratory.

Catalina Ortiz is a Colombian urbanist and educator who is passionate about spatial justice. She is committed to an ethics of care and an engaged scholarship to trigger radical spatial imagination for a negotiated co-production of space. She uses decolonial and critical urban theory through creative methodologies to study the politics of space production to foster more just cities and the recognition of multiple urban knowledges. Her work revolves around critical urban pedagogies, planning for equality, and southern urbanisms. She is Director of the Urban Laboratory at the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment.

Image: Ijlal Muzaffar

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