Tropicality has been historically appropriated by colonial powers and successive authorities in a way that overlooks local knowledge, embodied practices, sociality, and values embedded in material culture. This erasure has resulted in a depoliticization, dehistoricization, and desocialisation of issues related to tropical living. “A Journey Through Past, Present and Post-Tropicality”, a Master’s thesis by Annabelle Tan, proposes a new way of looking at the tropical environment with a methodology consisting of measured research into the technical and material, and a ethnographic, speculative approach to capture the unmeasurable. The project catalogs past and current ways of tropical living, from the “kampung way of life” to emergent post-pandemic practices, and draws from this knowledge to create a radically different paradigm for tropical housing infrastructure. Annabelle notes that every “attempt at progress and development beyond the colonial are inherently cemented in colonial notions of tropicality”. Nevertheless, a critical eye towards tools of control is matched in rigor in this research and design project by imaginations of potential collective affordances and alternative life-worlds that transcend neo-colonial and capitalist frames of tropicality. To access the project, please click the link below.