Unequal Ideas: Reflections on Designing Politics, an Urban Ideas Competition in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article initiates a discussion about the unequal geography of the labor that challenges institutions and processes of public scholarship in design. The comparison between the urban competitions in New York, London, and Rio de Janeiro demonstrates that it was only in the Global South that challenges to the technology of the competition were raised. These challenges were based on issues of power imbalances between institutions both within and between the Global North and Global South, and around questions of the social inequalities embedded in the structures of the competition itself (the submissions, the jury, the exhibition). Through this analysis, the article suggests that the burden of labor for decolonizing rests on those already oppressed by systems embedded in the continuous presence of colonialism.