Reader, who am I? Who are you? Where are we? What year is it? Trump is again President. And while it would be false to say nothing has changed this time around, we are, after all, in the middle of a genocide. This moment reflects something deeper — the world is moving in ways that feel unfamiliar. Populations shift amidst political unrest, economic turmoil and environmental crises, carrying with them histories, aspirations and ways of being. Within my own work, I have focused on Pacific diasporic identity but the complexity within this space is immense. Generations of people now identify across multiple states and places. What are their spaces? What should they look like? And how does a creative mode so deeply tied to the static — the built — encounter that which resists rootedness? How can that which is displaced find place?

Here, I must admit I have been reading Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. And, in that way a person who raises their hand to ask a question when invited at the end of a public lecture, actually just rephrases the latest book… I will look to do the same and rephrase Glissantian concepts.

In Poetics of Relation, errantry emerges as a mode of intentional wandering, distinct from exile. While exile is marked by loss and displacement, errantry transforms dislocation — or, perhaps more closely, a lack of location — into a generative process. It is relational, dynamic and guided by principles of connection and multiplicity.

For architecture, errantry offers a means of breaking free from Eurocentric traditions to build spaces that reflect the fluid, evolving identities of diaspora communities. For me, it may even suggest the end of modernist inclinations — an ideology long considered an objective standard of beauty, capable of being universally applied. This, in a way, has been part of its appeal: this idea that beauty, by way of balance and composition, neutralises power. It is that ostensible absence of power that enables community and a unified sense of humanity.

Yet, in my own community, the language of home-making and place emerges through ‘stuff’ — unyielding in its textile, plastic flowers, mismatched furniture and buckets. All this is to say: the spaces we inhabit are rarely neutral. They are shaped by power — political, social and economic — and often reflect the biases of their creators. Is it that so much of the built realm is created with the sense of a homogenous ‘we’, leaving it to people to create place through their own means? If this is so, what do the extraordinary events of the past eight years tell us that we need, seriously, to revisit about the built realm?

In times of unrest, space becomes a battleground. Protests on highways or in Parliament Grounds illustrate the ways in which architecture, imagined as a site of learning or commerce, can be re-imagined as a platform where power is contested.

Diasporic communities, as I reflect, challenge these traditional notions of space. And, in so doing, they invite new ways and entry points for how to tangibilise (this is definitely not a word but bear with me). For them, the built realm is not static but deeply relational: connected to memories, networks and the shared act of meaningmaking. As diasporic populations grow, they create opportunities to rethink architectural traditions. The question for architects is not only how to accommodate these communities but how to learn from their ways of creating and inhabiting space.

Errantry, to my mind, with its resistance to fixed identities, provides a framework for this learning. It challenges the idea of rootedness — central to Eurocentric spatial traditions — and, instead, embraces movement, adaptation and relation. In doing so, it aligns with the lived experiences of diaspora, where home is as much an idea as a place.

Glissant’s errantry is not just a poetic concept; it is a practical tool for rethinking the ways that space is produced and experienced. It resonates with different world views, which value connectedness to land, collective identity and spirituality. They may also help us align with Indigenous ways of being while not overstepping as tauiwi. These traditions offer holistic approaches to spatial production that prioritise relation over hierarchical systems which enable structures of oppression.

In postgraduate research on Sāmoan digital spatialities, I explored the ways in which women in the diaspora use digital platforms to create spaces that reflect Pacific values. These digital spaces are not bound by geography, yet they maintain a deep connection to culture, community and identity. They embody the principles of errantry, offering fluid and relational models of space-making. I have often thought that my own research interests like these were too specific, too niche, too cultural to offer up in these opinion columns. I often thought… this might be too alienating a topic for the readership. But, I reflect now, reader, that may not have been so fair to you.

Such practices challenge binary models of space — Indigenous versus settler, digital versus physical — and, instead, propose a continuum of possibilities. By engaging with these models, architects can expand their vocabulary to include relational and dynamic approaches to design. This is particularly urgent as traditional architectural frameworks often marginalise or erase diasporic contributions, treating them as peripheral rather than central to the discipline. This, I feel, is worth sharing.

Errantry offers a pathway for the decolonisation of architectural thought and practice. But, perhaps more importantly, it expands our vision, rejecting fixed notions of identity and space, and it encourages architects to think beyond borders, hierarchies and binaries.

The diaspora provides a living example of what such alternatives might look like. In creating spaces that are relational, fluid and adaptive, diasporic communities model a form of spatial production that is deeply resistant to the territorialising impulses of colonialism. Architects can learn from these practices, not as artefacts to be studied but as active contributors to the evolution of the field. Furthermore, it strikes me that the implications for architectural pedagogy are profound. Errantry challenges educators to move beyond static curricula and embrace relational approaches that honour the epistemic traditions of people, place and meaning-making. This requires not only diversifying teaching content but also rethinking the ways in which knowledge is produced and shared within the discipline. How exciting that the world can be remade!

Errantry is more than a framework for understanding diaspora; it is a call to action for architects to rethink the built realm. In a world of shifting populations and evolving identities, architecture must be as dynamic as are the communities it serves. By embracing errantry, architects can create spaces that are not only inclusive but transformative: spaces that honour the complexity of identity and relation in a globalised world.

In doing so, we move closer to an architecture that is truly of the people, for the people and by the people. And, in that movement, perhaps we can begin to imagine a future where space itself becomes an act of relation, a dialogue, between past and present, here and there, self and other.