Dr Suneela Ahmed
Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust Fellow, May - June 2025
Home institution: Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture
Suneela Ahmed is an architect, urbanist and an academic based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her interests lie in analyzing the everyday adaptations of architectural. Urban and rural spaces at grass root level by locals of the global south. She also dwells into the research of mitigation processes through the challenges of globalization, localization and informalization which gives shape to everyday spaces within a context and how these processes form local and global identities. She has written various research papers, book chapters, newspaper articles and presented in conferences around these issues/ themes/ ideas. She has a PhD from Oxford Brookes University and is currently heading the Department of Architecture at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Pakistan (https://www.indusvalley.edu.pk/home). Her first solo authorship was published in October 2022 entitled “Urban Architecture and Local Spaces in Pakistan’ by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
Project title: De-colonial Mapping and Research Methodologies
In regions of the global south affected by colonial legacies, the process of decolonization faces many challenges. These range from governance, to planning, to development. This is primarily due to a lack of localized understanding, limited data availability, and insufficient capacity building in research methods and mapping tools tailored to the specific context. Thus, in order to take informed development decisions there's a pressing need to adopt an introspective approach. This involves cultivating a deep comprehension and critical examination of globalizing structures within everyday contexts. Urban and architectural research, alongside other disciplines, must embrace decolonized methodologies to unravel the essence and significance of decolonization for both urban and rural areas in the global south.
This study seeks to explore innovative, grassroots research methodologies rooted in local contexts rather than imposing predetermined, top-down approaches. By decolonizing mapping and research methodologies, it aims to impartially document and analyze realities such as informality and informal processes prevalent in the global south. Additionally, the research endeavors to inform policy by ensuring that research findings are accurately reflected without distortion or bias in language. Furthermore, by emphasizing methodologies connected to specific locales, the study aims to develop a toolkit that can be utilized by other researchers undertaking similar endeavors. Thus, this research aims to delve into research methodologies that are novel, bottom up and connected to a locale rather than being pre-determined and top down.
The long term idea is to decolonize mapping and other research methodologies so that realities of the global south can be objectively documented and analyzed. Another objective is to feed the findings into policy, as many a times the language in which policy is put together itself becomes a way of undermining the research findings.
Since I am a resident of Karachi, Pakistan, my focus will be on Sindh’s cultural landscape. Two indigenous rural communities of Sindh, namely Thari Community of the Thar Desert and Mohana Community of the Manchar Lake will be used as case studies. The cultural landscapes of these two communities will eventually be mapped, and during the time spent at ISAH the methodologies for this mapping in the field will be developed.