Reimagining Futures for Kingston Jamaica. City, 1–26. August 2025. Link

This article examines how contemporary forms of debt—understood in financial and ethico-political terms—impact on the Jamaican built environment in particular and implicates more generally the current construction drive in the Caribbean and the postcolonial built environment across time. We do so through the controversy that followed the 2017 agreement between the government of Jamaica and China Construction America, the purpose of which was to carry out a radical urban transformation of Downtown Kingston. We argue that the ongoing construction phase in the Caribbean perpetuates spatio-political structures that organise dispossession and debt: from the agreement mechanisms adopted for the design, construction and maintenance of urban developments on the island, to the political, urban and architectural legacies and obligations mobilised throughout the said controversy, which acutely intensified with the master plan conceptualisation for the government campus and a new Houses of Parliament. Here, on the urban and architectural site of national governance and political representation itself, we reveal the urban and architectural form of a dominant politics of demolition and exclusion that is perpetuating in contemporary urban Jamaica.