Decentering Perspectives: Embracing the Pluriverse in Researching the Architecture of the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

This paper develops a pluriversal methodological framework for researching architecture within transanational infrastructure development, using the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a laboratory. Existing scholarship has often interpreted BRI projects through geopolitics or economic strategy, focusing on questions of China’s global strategy, resource security, and the extension of its sphere of influence (Cai, 2017; Summers, 2016). Within these narratives, architecture and urbanization typically appear as secondary by-products of development, subordinated to the logics of diplomacy and investment flows. This tendency overlooks the ways in which BRI projects actively shape spatial orders, produce new architectural forms, and generate contested meaning, which cannot be fully captured by universalizing interpretations. Drawing on decolonial and posthumanist thought (Escobar, 2018; de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018; Mignolo, 2011), the paper argues for methodologies that recognize infrastructures as plural artifacts rather than singular instruments. Building on extensive documentation of BRI projects, four orientations are proposed: recognizing multiple realities, grounding analysis in lived contexts, tracing relational entanglements, and valuing alternative logics. Case studies—from the Pakistan-China Technical and Vocational Institute in Gwadar and the Xi’an Silk and Road Conference Center, to the Hiyaa Housing Project in the Maldives, Kilamba Kiaxi in Angola, and the Lianglu-Cuntan Free Trade Port in Chongqing—demonstrate how BRI architectures simultaneously function as geopolitical symbols, civic institutions, everyday spaces, and material assemblages. By foregrounding plurality rather than universality, the paper reframes the BRI as a site of translation between diverse worlds, and advances a methodological agenda for architectural research that is inclusive, relational, and attentive to the co-existence of multiple epistemologies.