A weird-tender: unearthing an inclusive practice for public procurement in Lusaka through design, fiction and performance

In this thesis, I build on research linking extraction, property and racialised subjectivities [Bhandar, Mbembe, Yusoff], contributing an analysis of how, in Lusaka, architecture and procurement are used to facilitate exclusions and access to minerals elsewhere. I question how unearthing weird and tender practices developed in the bygone Zambian Space Program, can inform an architectural practice that disrupts these extractive, exclusionary dynamics. I explore how an output of this practice – a Weird-Tender – developed with the Lusaka City Council and the Chunga Waste Recyclers Association, can intervene in the privatisation of the Chunga Landfill, offering an alternative to exclusionary, extractive modes of tendering in the city. This work involves archival research, interviews, site visits, fiction and creative writing, design, drawing and participatory performance. Through scenes revealing and excavating a spaceship in a fictional city called Mailo, I build on research into designing, performing, and writing through fictional worlds [Hartman, Boal, Nkoloso, Rendell] towards an innovative and inclusive mode of public procurement in Lusaka. Mailo acts as an architectural interpretation of the ‘weird' [Fisher, Miéville] - a rendering of Lusaka, past, parallel and possible - made 'tender', through care afforded to its deployment, and through performance. The Weird-Tender is centrally positioned within the thesis and designed to be extracted from the document in London for submission to the Council in Lusaka, materially reversing a historical trend of South to North flows of knowledge and resources. Preceding the Weird-Tender are essays which investigate the city as a site facilitating exclusions and extraction, and studying the practices established historically to contest this through the Zambian Space Program. Following the Weird-Tender is an analysis of the methods developed through the thesis – a weird and tender architectural practice – culminating in a 'Call for Expressions of Interest' to develop this practice further.