This Projects section seeks to examine different ways of articulating the migrant being beyond their definition as alienated victims with no agency and waiting for help. It does not seek to highlight projects by architects designed for migrants, but rather projects in which architecture is a tool to reclaim the migrant’s right to be an active participant in the construction of his or her environment. Often, the discussion around migration and architecture is reduced to a conversation about ingenious solutions to shelter the migrant with innovations in temporary structures, such as tents, or reuse of obsolete buildings. While these are valid questions that should be addressed from the field of architecture, there is a role that architecture plays in migration processes that goes beyond providing shelter.
Within this state of exception, transition and temporality in which migrants find themselves, alternative spaces and architectures often emerge outside conventional logics, such as the demarcation between public and private, which can inform and enrich the way in which we conceive our cities. Thus, it becomes obvious that there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in the way we approach the migrant, not as a problem or a passive victim waiting for help, but as a subject with valuable experiences, knowledge and perspectives to contribute to society.
This compilation of projects seeks, beyond showcasing great works of architecture, to provoke conversations that will ultimately subvert our preconceived notions of what architecture should represent and whom it should serve.
Permanent Temporariness
After seventy years of existence, Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank are no longer composed of a series of tents; neither are they composed of buildings similar to urban environments. They exist in a paradoxical space between the temporary and the permanent. The Concrete Tent project represents this paradox. From the camp’s inception, and over the years, Palestinian refugees were faced with the dilemma of the need to replace the tents with more permanent and resilient structures and, at the same time, the fear that in doing so they would lose the right to return to the places of origin from which they had been displaced. This is how, from the beginning, architecture has been a political act in the development of the camp. Since then, the refugees have been torn between wanting to maintain an image of temporariness that symbolizes their struggle to return and, at the same time, claiming the right to live in a dignified built environment. Since 2012, Campus in Camps, an alternative educational platform founded by architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), was established in the Deheisheh refugee camp, aiming to address the multiple spatial and social needs of the camps, combining theory and practice.
In dialogue with refugee communities, Campus in Camps and its students, a group of young refugees, explore and produce new forms of representation, beyond the static and traditional symbols of passivity and poverty related to camps and refugees. In an environment where the notion of the private and the public does not exist, the students of Campus in Camps, starting from reflections on the collective, have questioned and intervened meeting places in the camps. In this context, Concrete Tent is not only a symbol of the permanent temporality of the camps, but at the same time it has become a space for reflection and encounter.
Lives on hold
In the capital of Lesbos, Mytilene, near the Moria camp, the Office of Displaced Designers (ODD), an architecture and design organization focused on facilitating knowledge exchange between refugees and the local population to promote social cohesion through design projects was established in 2017. This initiative arises as a response to the unfortunate situation in which thousands of refugees are trapped in misery in camps in Europe with nothing to do, day after day, waiting for their asylum situation to be resolved. Thus, the ODD provides a space that seeks to recognize, harness and enrich the skills and knowledge of many of the refugees arriving in these camps. Through workshops, exchanges and design projects, participants have the opportunity not only to grow professionally, but also to reclaim their right to be productive members of society and contribute to the improvement of their environment as designers. Olive Grove, one of the projects developed by ODD and commissioned by the Danish Red Cross, consisted of a process of co-design and construction by camp residents of a recreational space adjacent to the Moria refugee camp. Months after the project was completed, this space was invaded by tents to accommodate the overgrowth of the camp, resulting, once again, in the fragility of the quality collective spaces that bring some dignity to life within the camp.
The Eternal Guest
What happens when we move from the refugee camp to scenarios where migrants arrive in European cities, subject to integration policies that demarcate the relationship between the host country and the guest migrant? With DAAR, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, together with Yasmeen Mahmoud, Ibrahim Muhammad Haj Abdulla and Ayat Al-Turshan, they explore this question in their project Living Room. The initiative was born in the city of Boden, in northern Sweden, a reception center for asylum seekers. It is inspired by the story of a Syrian refugee architect couple, Yasmeen and Ibrahim, who upon arriving in Boden and feeling alienated from the public space, decided to open their living room to other migrants and Swedish residents as a space for interaction and, more importantly, a space where they could reclaim their right to be hosts. Through the resignification of this architectural space, traditionally conceived within the logic of the private, Living Room not only opens the possibility for migrants to regain control of their narrative and stop being eternal static guests, but also allows them to contribute to and enrich public life with the emergence of alternative spaces that precisely blur the lines between public and private, inclusion and exclusion and host and guest.
Recognizing the potential of multiple lounges that could serve as places to exercise the right to be guests, Living Room has been activating a series of lounges around the world, creating a network of spaces for reflection and action on what it means to be a migrant through the act of hosting.
Building Peace
After signing the Peace Agreement in Colombia in 2016, efforts began to reincorporate thousands of ex-combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia into civil society. Some of them have opted for a collective reincorporation process through the implementation of a pilot project of housing cooperatives Ciudadelas de Paz (Peace Citadels), inspired by the Uruguayan model of housing cooperatives by mutual aid. This project seeks not only to support the consolidation of peace through the reintegration of ex-combatants, but also to become a prototype for alternative and sustainable ways of providing affordable housing in Colombia.
By linking livelihood opportunities with housing production, 350 ex-combatants currently living in two territorial training and reincorporation spaces have established and received training to form productive units for the production of compact earth blocks, carpentry and ornamentation. This not only provides the technical capacity for ex-combatants to build their houses through a mutual aid approach, but also trains them as construction experts. Ciudadelas de Paz is a commitment on the part of the community of Ciudadelas de Paz is a bet by the ex-combatants community that through their reincorporation process they can create links with neighboring communities and contribute to Colombian society with alternatives to respond to the housing crisis that is overwhelming the country and the region.
