Homes are mirrors of who we are – our taste – our likes and dislikes. They’re also the sacred HQ from which we build a shared politic with our fellow kinfolk and with our surroundings. Perhaps as an architectural designer, I'm biased, but in shaping new futures, domestic space is central – it matters what our houses look like and even more so, what we want them to look like.

Like with nearly all Caribbean islands, in Jamaica, people are incredibly in touch with the environment. With around 50% forest cover by land area, you’re never far from nature. Most people know the basics of how to grow, harvest, and at least read the land. It’s an intimate, lived connection. Yet strangely, it’s also one that rarely extends to the domestic setting, often stopping at the driveway entrance.

As a burgeoning economy with a growing middle class, many Jamaicans have a palpable desire for a ‘modern’ way of living, the McMansion-style Miami beach houses complete with all the swanky mod-cons with the tropical bush terrain relegated to the backdrop. And thus, today’s ideas of emancipatory living includes air conditioning, white marble flooring, and giant monolithic concrete castles.

Which raises a curious architectural conundrum: how did we get from a land called the ‘Isle of Wood and Water’ to almost entirely developing architectures from concrete and cement?

As the Western world scrambles to mitigate its climate impact, development and decarbonisation are often framed as opposing forces. Since the Global South has contributed less than 10% of historical global carbon emissions, the call to slow progress feels unfair, even hypocritical, and so for emerging economies, the idea of development is still messily entangled with a drive toward a tenuous mirage of modernity wrapped up in relentless building and in many ways, a divergence from the natural world.

Flipping this on its head, a decolonial architecture asserts that a return to the language of our ancestors and our environment is development. Beginning to untangle these threads – it’s a call for deep unlearning that reimagines how we build. In the words of Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Sônia Guajajara, ‘The future is ancestral.’

As an architectural designer who’s spent time designing buildings on the island, I’ve been repeatedly haunted (and continue to be) by this tendency to default to the quasi-modernist ‘white box.’ But what if the next chapter of modern living isn’t about excommunicating nature but reacquainting our homes with the language of the land? As conservationist Prakash Kashwan reminds us: ‘The assumption of nature-society separation is based on a very specific European cultural experience and cultural philosophy.’

In taking steps to fight climate change, building a sustainable future requires systems that are linked to the immediate natural environment and incumbent on a circular relationship with the land. As writer and architect Lesley Lokko remarks, ‘Decarbonisation of the planet is inherently linked to decolonisation’ – a decolonisation that sees humans not as separate, but as part of a profoundly spiritual and material ecosystem.

Taking decolonial practice and running with it, a handful of architects, designers, and craftspeople are pushing the envelope in reimagining ancestral forms of architecture. Projects such as Kounkuey’s (‘to know intimately’) Public Space Project in Kenya adopt a hybridised palette of industrial materials such as plastic and metal with variations of tactile, locally sourced materials, coupling corrugated metal roofs cut against colourful window frames and thin timber batten screens. This speaks to a comforting confluence of industrial mass production with the organic and ancestral.

Meanwhile, collectives such as Hive Earth, based in Ghana, are perfecting the use of rammed earth in vivid splendour. Coloured horizontal stratas of earth give a new playful energy to the walls. Projects such as the Rammed Earth Library at Nsutam by Dot Ateliers, Accra, Ghana, push the material to new heights (literally) as the three-storey building, pokes its head above its surrounding structures showing its possible use a locally sourced material that references the traditional clay architecture of the region, in a totally new form.

As we move toward an ever-pressing need for decarbonisation, decolonisation in the built environments of the Global South presents an engine for cultural shift amid rising wealth and sprouting industries. Yasmeen Lari, activist and architect, works from a climate-responsive vernacular. Originally influenced by modernism, her work draws upon the immediate natural environment, pushing material capabilities through their reframing in contemporary use. With beams of bamboo and thatch roofs, suspended lightweight structures offer a valuable line of defense against flooding, sparking a cordial conversation of reverence with the natural environment and traditional ways of building.

While vernaculars of an ‘Ancestral Futurism’ on a large scale are few and far between, it represents a shift of identity that challenges how we might see ‘developing’ countries develop, not in the image of the West or in any international style, but in the image of the hyper-local and contextual. Responding to the environmental and the transcendent in equal measure through the fabric and form of domestic construction.

From the walled sanctuaries of Koutammakou to the domed thatch roofs and carved columns of Bandjoun Great House, homes offer gateways to the cosmos via the landscape. In the onward march of development, we need not pave over paradise. Going back to go forwards, the architecture of ancestors provides a ready-made blueprint to combat climate change and provides new visions of modernity. As Marcus Garvey famously said, ‘A people without knowledge of their history is like a tree without roots.’ Though this might mean returning to the archives and digging through long lost texts, it might also be true that our ancestors are alive and well within us and within the land, we just need to remember how to reach them.