It’s UNGA week and many of you are in New York City. I have good reasons not to be there this year; it is my daughter’s last week at home before she is off to university this weekend, so I would not want to be anywhere else! But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a flicker of professional FOMO watching the week unfold from afar.
It is easy to sneer at these global gatherings when you are not part of it, but the reality is, we need them more than ever. The pattern is clear, not just in New York but elsewhere and in every sector, from climate to the arts. A summit becomes an opportunity for side events, side events become bigger than the summit, the ‘fringe’ takes over the festival, and the coming together gets bigger and bigger: New York, Edinburgh, Venice, Davos, Milan, you name it. Humanity needs a centre of gravity and a space to be together, when eyes meet, hands shake and hugs are shared. The more our world becomes digital, the more being in the room together seems to matter.
The theme in New York this week, as in most global gatherings lately, is the overwhelming pace of global change. Wars, AI, climate: all is an emergency, everything is urgent, the world is changing in ways we can neither predict nor fully prevent. Speed, adaptation under pressure is what is called for, and it is small wonder that institutions, norms, professions, whole sectors are struggling to keep up. There’s a huge amount at stake. There’s power at stake.
The default response is to try to change these institutions, processes and sectors from within. It’s an immense task. Even setting aside the famously slow, famously obscure “UN reform” agenda, look at the bigger picture: Africa holds nearly a fifth of the world’s population and no permanent seat at the UN Security Council. These are institutions built to hold a fixed, small number of seats, allocated according to a twentieth-century idea of “world powers.” How far can we really get by not addressing these underlying structural issues and in built incentives that prevent rather than foster change? What, in practice, can be done?
Here’s a thought: get out. Build some breathing space outside, elsewhere ‘escapes routes’ until the centre itself moves. Let’s just meet elsewhere, not just in NYC.
A few weeks ago I was in Nairobi for the inaugural Pan African Biennale of Architecture. Bear with me as architecture biennales have more in common with the UN than you might expect. Until quite recently, “biennale” simply meant Venice. And Venice, in recent years, has turned much of its architecture and art programming toward the so-called “global south” in an attempt to decentre, even to decolonise the arts, not unlike what’s happening in New York this week, with so many events reckoning with the harm of colonisation and the rising importance of the so called ‘global south’ to humanity’s future.
But the contradiction of holding those conversations in the very places responsible for extracting resources and stifling development elsewhere can’t be ignored forever.
So let’s move the conversation, literally, to where it matters. To where those who cannot be in the room actually hold the room, not because they’ve been “invited” to the table, but because they own the table they built, a long time ago.
This is exactly what the Pan African Biennale set out to do, choosing Nairobi (amongst other reasons) because Kenya has granted visa free travel for all Africans, therefore inviting people in instead of keeping people out. Titled Shifting the Centre: from Fragility to Resilience, the biennale offered a space for Africa to ‘re-centre itself in the global architectural discourse, not as a peripheral observer or passive recipient, but as a generative force behind sustainable, equitable, and culturally grounded practices’ (from the curatorial statement). Clearly this extends far beyond the architecture discourse alone.
Shifting the centre isn’t a matter of principle, it’s a matter of practice and choice. Dakar is about to hold the first ever Olympics event on the African continent, Nairobi was chosen over London to hold the World Athletics Championship in 2029 . Global events, biennales, Olympics, summits, can and should be held across all of the world’s capitals and centres. The real, whole world, not the Western powers shortlist.
The cost of choosing not to do this, of continuing to navel-gaze a new model of international cooperation from inside UN buildings or overpriced Manhattan venues, is simply too high.
Take visas. The World Cup has already surfaced the problem: the people with the ideas, the talent, the energy to see the transitions the world needs through are too often not allowed in the room. They can’t even visit. They can’t be tourists in the cities where “global affairs” are being decided on their behalf.
Then there’s trust. There’s only so long you can call for a radical shift in narrative without changing anything real. Change is a matter of practice, of choice, the same choice that put Nairobi ahead of London for athletics and over Venice for architecture. Changing the where changes the how: moving in and of itself offers new perspectives, faces and voices, a new tone and a much needed new gaze on the ‘global’.
It took a long time for the UN to correct the map of Africa so it reflects the continent’s true scale (while doing very little to correct the colonial legacy of its borders). It will take a lot longer to relocate its heads of states summits, and quite frankly I am not sure it is worth the wait or it is even the point. But those of us with more freedom, more imagination, some access - and increasingly more power - can start moving now. By doing so we can begin to remove those borders, at least the imaginary ones.
The centre has already shifted. Time to move with it.