Global Consultancies

Ongoing research,
2024.

Global engineering and architecture consultancies constitute a large share of the contemporary construction market and shape cities and infrastructures worldwide. However, despite the impressive scope of operations, these large business entities remain overlooked in architectural and construction histories. To understand the modus operandi of these contemporary giants, the project turns to their post-war global rise, when many of their main operative principles were forged. Originally smaller engineering firms engaged with domestic infrastructural projects, by the mid-1960s, they merged into large corporate entities, venturing into new lucrative markets in the Global South. Now, infrastructural projects were carried out under the name of global development and administered through the networks of national and multilateral aid organisations. And while infrastructural “development” projects recently began to draw scholarly attention, engineering consultancies behind these projects remain overlooked.

This project aims to fill this void by conceptualising the role of global consultancies in shaping the built environment of the Global South. It asks, what was the role of global consultancies in the business of development? The hypothesis is that business actors behind large “developmental” projects played an essential but often concealed role in shaping not only built infrastructures but societies, landscapes and ways of thinking.

in progress

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