It is often assumed that architects and urban planners are responsible for shaping our cities. Especially since the onset of global capitalism, however, much urban expansion worldwide has been driven by developers and builders in the pursuit of profit. Despite the considerable effects of market logic on urban space, the mechanisms of this influential industry have received comparatively limited attention within architectural history. This volume collectively foregrounds the actors behind real estate development – developers and builders as well as financiers and media strategists – as producers of architecture. It advances the study of real estate as a significant object of inquiry for architectural history and puts forward methods and types of evidence useful for its investigation. In doing so, it seeks to further our understanding of how cities are designed and the ways speculation has shaped the built environment from the eighteenth century to the present.

The modern Moravians are notable as an independent religious movement that for over two centuries developed a highly interconnected global network of settlements and mission stations. By 1800, three times as many Moravian missionaries were being sent into the world as all other Protestant missionary organizations combined and close to twenty carefully planned Moravian communities had been established on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. A century later, the Moravian world comprised hundreds of settlements in every continent except for Antarctica. A Complicated Organism examines the role of architecture and spatial thinking in enabling the modern Moravians to perform their unique brand of global organizational governance. It explores the development of their sprawling network of settlements in relation to concepts of religious and social order, practices of archiving, systems of communication and media, discourses of humanitarianism and expertise, and colonial regimes of control and subjugation. Throughout, this volume argues that architectural production always remained inseparable from these wider strategic objectives, providing the Moravians with a flexible yet coherent model for establishing similar conditions in diverse environments around an increasingly connected world.

Abstract This article addresses the process and patterns by which private property has been applied on the Australian continent. Alongside both lease‐holdings that are limited by term or perpetual and squatting practices, identifying and documenting private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British–Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private land ownership can be read in relation to other forms of land use and tenure each subject to specific historical legal instruments and definitions. We explore how, in particular, the first‐generation alienation of private property might be constructed, represented, and theorised using a critical approach to GIS tools and practices. What technical considerations are required to identify the extent of a site and map its transfer into private hands? How far can the process of mapping the initial alienation of parcels of Crown land over time expose legacies of colonial practices in present‐day methods and serve as a testbed to generate other layers that capture, for instance, patterns of informal privatisation or interact with other phenomena—most notably that of frontier violence—that likewise occur on land, in time? Such work can be located among those wrestling with problems of mapping colonial land occupation with technologies that share a heritage with the surveying tools that allowed that same acquisition and can enhance a critical approach to GIS in relation to appropriation and dispossession of Aboriginal land.

Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific explores the architecture of colonial trade and industry, revealing a complex network of transnational connections across the built heritage of the world’s most dispersed and culturally diverse region. A wide-ranging collection of case studies uncover these forgotten connections, drawing together stories of migratory architects, imperial commodities, and indentured labour. From Iran to Tasmania, Japan to Java, and Imperial China to the Pacific Islands, the chapters reveal how remnants of colonial trade and industry shed light on the many multi-faceted mobilities of the imperial age, and their enduring legacy in the postcolonial built environments of Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond. The chapters also reveal deep strands of cultural influences and material imprints long neglected by national histories of architecture, and showcase new methodologies to analyse the interconnectivities and bordering practices which are shaping our experiences of the 21st century. With almost every chapter arising from new archival sources, this richly interdisciplinary volume brings together the work of architectural historians, geographers and heritage practitioners to provide a new understanding of the rich and contested history of this region.

Following the collapse of the Australian property boom in the 1880s, public trust in the volatile colonial land market — largely fuelled by overseas speculation — was exceptionally low. Colonial governments and financial institutions attempted to stabilise the economy in part by making ownership of property more accessible to greater portions of the domestic population. In the colony of Victoria, this led to the introduction of a transformative financial instrument: the credit foncier loan. Credit foncier loans are fixed-term loans, secured against the value of land and backed by the government, in which principal and interest are repaid on a regular basis. The State Savings Bank of Victoria (SSBV) established its first credit foncier scheme in the 1890s. Loans covered the cost of land, construction and connection to utilities, as well as one of the many designs preapproved by the bank under the scheme. These designs prescribed suitable materials, methods of construction, fixings and appliances. By the 1920s, around 1,300 so-called bank houses were being constructed in Victoria annually and the SSBV had established a dedicated Building Department to ‘design and supervise the erection of low-cost housing’ for the people of Victoria.  This essay explores the ways in which the credit foncier scheme effectively transformed a Protestant-inspired savings bank into a real estate developer. It examines how the architecture of the bank houses was designed to meet the commercial imperatives of the SSBV: by mitigating risk, acting as collateral, attracting insurance premiums and through the sale of architectural plans produced for the scheme. At the same time, the paper examines how the terms of the credit foncier loan also facilitated homeownership for a financially indebted — and thereby ‘settled’ — 20th-century population, propelling the settler colonial project in Victoria towards a pervasive paradigm of ‘residential capitalism’ based on the commodification of dispossessed Aboriginal land.

Keller Easterling is an unconventional thinker. Spanning writing, creative practice and teaching, her work draws on disparate sources and intellectual traditions: from media theory to the philosophy of ecology; economic geography to game theory; anarchisms to feminisms; and from decolonisation to political discourse analysis. Infrastructure, mutualism, reparations, freedom, fugitivity, indeterminacy, whiteness, failure and solidarity emerge as core concerns in her wider attempts to develop an artistic approach capable of contending with contemporary forms of violence and power. In late 2023, Architectural Theory Review (ATR), in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), invited Easterling to discuss her recent work on the civil rights movement in the US. Easterling sat down with Endriana Audisho (UTS) and Jasper Ludewig (ATR) to elaborate on the themes and questions that emerged from this work, discussing their relevance to her scholarship, pedagogy and broader spatial practice.

This paper explores the relationship between architecture and colonial sovereignty. It considers the case of the British colony of Queensland’s offshore islands, which existed somewhere between competing colonial jurisdictions and international waters following Queensland’s separation from the colony of New South Wales in 1859. The discussion situates this nineteenth-century moment within a broader history of British colonial occupation and development along Australia’s eastern seaboard dating to the late eighteenth century. This paper argues that anomalies of colonial law did not constitute an impediment to colonial sovereignty — rather, they were its very modes of articulation. Whereas Queensland’s offshore islands had previously constituted a maritime frontier that was actively exploited by private enterprise, as a result of the Queensland Coast Islands Act 1879, the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait Islands were gradually transformed into a geography of regulation that assisted in governing the political community of the colony as a whole. This paper adopts an infrastructuralist analysis, reading the architecture of colonial development alongside other technologies and media as instruments in the implementation and clarification of colonial jurisdiction.