Decolonising architectural heritage: Difficult architecture as a counter-discourse to the Authorised Heritage Discourse

Architectural heritage value in official regimes is often assigned through aesthetic merit, monumental scale, material authenticity, and the judgement of accredited experts, a configuration that Laurajane Smith names the Authorised Heritage Discourse. Within this regime, colonial and postcolonial sites frequently enter heritage narratives as objects of beauty, civic order, national progress, or urban obsolescence, while the violence, labour, dispossession, and epistemic hierarchies that produced them are displaced from view. This article theorises Difficult Architecture as a decolonial counter-discourse to the Authorised Heritage Discourse and as a critical-interpretive category within architectural heritage studies. Difficult Architecture names buildings, infrastructures, settlements, and spatial systems whose value cannot be settled through aesthetic, monumental, or conservation criteria alone, and which must instead be read through the domination, erasure, trauma, labour, memory, and resistance they materialise.

Methodologically, the article adopts a qualitative, multi-sited critical-interpretive approach organised through three interrelated datasets. The first consists of three architectural-spatial case studies: Pudu Prison, Chinese New Villages, and Kampung Bahru. These cases allow the framework to be examined across carceral architecture, colonial settlement planning, and contested urban-village heritage. The second dataset is drawn from three iterations of a decolonial architectural-history seminar, where novice readers engaged with colonial and postcolonial built environments through guided interpretive exercises. The third dataset consists of readings and interpretations from architects and heritage practitioners, allowing the framework to be tested against professional modes of architectural and heritage judgement. The analysis combines architectural-spatial case study analysis, critical discourse analysis, and reflexive thematic analysis to examine how heritage value is produced, contested, and re-situated.

The article advances a framework that inverts three value-axes of the Authorised Heritage Discourse and specifies five interpretive registers through which this inversion is read: spatial violence, epistemic erasure, affective discomfort, marginalised memory, and transgressive reinterpretation. It grounds the framework in Sandra Harding’s strong objectivity, arguing that accounts originating with communities marked by colonial spatial regimes are more adequate, rather than less, than ostensibly neutral descriptions of the architectural canon. The contribution is both theoretical and methodological: a decolonial framework, anchored in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, for reading colonial and postcolonial heritage value otherwise.