Archinect - News

Architects for Gaza launches Gaza Global University for afflicted Palestinian students

2024-03-18T18:07:00-04:00

The UK-based group Architects for Gaza, appealing to the educational needs of displaced Palestinian architecture students in the occupied territory, has just announced the creation of a new learning platform called Gaza Global University.

The announcement was made earlier this month via Instagram. The group says: "We know that to rebuild Gaza requires rebuilding its institutions, its culture, its life — and importantly for those of us not situated in Gaza — it requires a rebuilding of all our worlds. We see Gaza Global University as a radical pedagogical project rooted in hope and shared humanity."

According to the group's website, the objectives for developing the initiative include:

Establishing links with academic institutions internationally to offer online tutorials and lectures free of charge Gazan students in any part of the world, who are students of architecture, and related courses, such as design and urbanism.
Offering technological assistance for remote communication at...

Hapi Homes donates 10 “foldable” residential structures in Odesa

2023-04-07T11:33:00-04:00

A new gift facilitated by the Ukrainian Red Cross has installed 10 new “foldable” modular home designs from Hapi Homes, LLC. to the beleaguered historic port city of Odesa.

The gift is meant to house local families that have been displaced as a result of the ongoing conflict. The two-bedroom units come fully furnished and are set to be delivered later in the month in an effort to alleviate the burden on local workers – all doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers, respectively.

The company says: “The prefabricated homes are prebuilt and folded by Hapi Homes and assembled on-site. Each home is “plug-and-play,” and will be assembled in less than 8 hours. The homes will be located on a 2.4-acre site that the city hopes will ultimately house more than 70 homes."

Image courtesy Hapi Homes LLC.

Each design offers a total of 420 square feet of space for the workers’ families and includes a kitchenette, private bathroom, dining, and living room, with double-layered tempered glass windows, ...

Framing Atlanta’s BeltLine as a font for gentrification

2023-02-03T13:22:00-05:00

Although the BeltLine was designed to connect Atlantans and improve their quality of life, it has driven up housing costs on nearby land and pushed low-income households out to suburbs with fewer services than downtown neighborhoods. The BeltLine has become a prime example of what urban scholars call “green gentrification” – a process in which restoring degraded urban areas by adding green features drives up housing prices and pushes out working-class residents.

Atlanta’s in-progress 22-mile-long urban greenway is often cited alongside New York’s High Line and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park as developments that spurred displacement in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a concern echoed by opponents of the LA River Master Plan in recent years.

Georgia State University Professor of Urban Studies Dan Immergluck points to the BeltLine’s under-delivery of affordable housing in areas where property values exploded after its TIF was adopted in 2005 as its main flaw. The “urban regime” initiative to lure tech and other high-paying companies using tax incentives is also a factor. Between 1990 and 2019, Atlanta lost one-fifth (receding from 67% to 48%) of its Black population due to gentrification.

New leadership is attempting to address the issue through inclusionary zoning. Meanwhile, the BeltLine's CEO Clyde Higgs has admitted to past oversights and says they are now tracking the problem proactively in order to identify areas that “may re...

Doctors Without Borders seeks architect to join their global humanitarian missions

2023-01-18T11:12:00-05:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for a Shop Manager at Studio Sanford Biggers, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an open position on Archinect Jobs for an Architect at Doctors Without Borders.

The role, which requires a minimum of two years’ experience, calls for an architect who will oversee the design and construction of infrastructure to support the organization’s international humanitarian missions. Responsibilities in the role can range from feasibility studies and design proposals to management of the tendering, construction, and completion process.

In return, and aside from conventional industry workplace benefits, the organization offers to cover a range of primary costs including pre-departure inductions, vaccinations, visas, transportation and accommodation in the field, and psychosocial care support before and after missions.

Opposition to NEOM displacement leads three Saudi tribesmen to death sentences

2022-10-18T15:45:00-04:00

Three men have been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia over their alleged opposition to the country’s NEOM project, according to a report published last week by the human rights monitoring group ALQST.

Image courtesy ALQST

The Saudi Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) handed down the sentences on October 2nd in the face of their continued social media criticism and organizing against the government's program of forced evictions that had been enacted in order to make room for the $500 billion megaproject.

Previously: The Line, the largest part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious NEOM project, looks like a total fantasy

The three men are members of the Huwaitat Tribe, a formerly nomadic group endemic to the northern Tabuk province, which has been the subject of bribes, violence, surveillance drones, and other forms of harassment since the first announcement of crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s "new way of living" in 2017. They are also known to be the relatives of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti, a 43-yea...

Angry letter from Architects Climate Action Network ignites controversy over 'greenwashing' and the 2022 Stirling Prize shortlist

2022-07-29T12:35:00-04:00

A public rebuke from the UK-based activist group Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) has triggered an enlivened debate online around greenwashing and the 2022 RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist after the initial group of projects was revealed last week.

Two London area residential projects included in the six-project shortlist — Panter Hudspith’s Orchard Gardens and Hopkins Architects’ 100 Liverpool Street — were given as examples of what the environmental group called “architecture that pollutes the planet.”

ACAN called out the former over its involvement in the demolition of the Heygate Estate as part of developer Lendlease’s Elephant Park ‘regeneration’ scheme, which helped displace some 80 percent of council housing residents in the SE17 postal code. In response, Panter Hudspith said: “It’s the job of the RIBA to judge buildings on their architectural quality with environmental credentials being an ever-increasing criteria in their assessment. So it seems unreasonable to suggest...

First came Putin’s War, then came the permanent changes to the architecture of one vital Ukrainian city

2022-06-21T17:46:00-04:00

The new construction is part of planning by Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who said he envisioned a new, more resilient Ukraine after this war and is revamping his city’s infrastructure to prepare for an almost constant state of conflict […] for those displaced by war, Anton Kolomeytsev is envisioning something much less adorned, but no less graceful.

According to the New York Times, Lviv, Ukraine’s westernmost major city with a population of approximately 800,000, could face a war-fed refugee increase of around 50,000 persons if the process of internal displacement continues at its current pace. Recently updated building codes means the wave of new five- and seven-story apartment block developments must include mandated bomb shelters and reinforced concrete safety rooms (also called “Mamads”) in each unit. The first new developments are expected within two months.

Other designers have been able to expedite the housing process with a bit more alacrity, but Lviv's chief architect, Anton Kolomeytsev, says the protocol is always to plan buildings that can last for centuries. Kolomeytsev, the 35-year-old in charge of the rebuilding, said it also hinges on a concerted effort to preserve the city’s rich aesthetic character (including some of its Soviet-era examples) side-by-side with any new development in a plan that echoes key aspec...

Kyiv-based Balbek Bureau develops modular refugee shelters for displaced Ukrainians

2022-03-29T16:58:00-04:00

With more than 3.7 million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the country and another 6.5 million internally displaced, architects in Ukraine have been hard-pressed to put their skills to work by creating the necessary shelters and accommodations required for those uprooted by the brutal Russian war machine.

One such firm at the forefront of this effort is Kyiv-based balbek bureau, an award-winning 70-member practice whose peacetime portfolio ranges from retail and residential spaces to corporate offices, hotels, restaurants, and wellness centers. Led by its founder Slava Balbek, the team has pivoted to the refugee crisis with a new project for temporary housing titled RE: UKRAINE.

Rendered image © Balbek Bureau.

The modular town system is meant to provide a modicum of dignity for their fellow citizens via the expedited delivery of an adjustable set of structures centered around four basic elements: private rooms, public recreation areas, adequate kitchens, an...

Lawmakers are pushing for change in the wake of last month's deadly Twin Parks Fire as residents look to rebuild

2022-02-10T16:30:00-05:00

It has been a month since the deadly space heater-induced apartment fire at the Twins Parks housing complex claimed the lives of 17 people and displaced more than 200 families from a largely Gambian immigrant community in the South Bronx. The incident has turned into a bellwether for the state of public housing and building safety in the United States and elsewhere. Here is an update on the events that have transpired in the four weeks following the deadly blaze.

At least 59 families have been staying in hotels spread out across the Bronx with several different local agencies working to secure long-term solutions. Many of the displaced are reporting challenges and limited options and a lack of genuine concern.

“No one is helping us working class. We don't know where to go, what to do – they keep holding that we have income over our heads,” Vercie Pope told a local news outlet. “One case worker told me pay for it yourself, pay out of pocket for everything. I don't think I have to pay...

Controversial San Jose Flea Market redevelopment gets approval from city council

2021-07-08T19:27:00-04:00

The council’s decision comes after months of significant organizing and protesting, including a two-day hunger strike last week, by vendors who felt that they were shut out of negotiations. It also follows months of mediating between the vendors and the Bumb family by councilmember David Cohen, who represents the district where the market is located.

A large multi-use development project has been proposed for the site, which is adjacent to a BART station, since at least 2007. The site currently hosts a flea market that caters to primarily Spanish-speaking lower-income residents.

Recent protests have combined public outcry to draw some concessions. The Bumb family, which owns the property, will pay $5 million to the vendors as part of an assistance package that will allow them to stay until construction begins.

The Mercury News has more on the story here.

14th-Century Italian village resurfaces from lake for the first time in over 70 years

2021-05-20T19:37:00-04:00

The submerged Italian village of Curon is resurfacing for the first time in over 70 years.

Located in the northern part of the country near Switzerland, the village, dating back to the 14th Century, was once home to hundreds of people. However, in 1950 construction began on a large dam in order to produce hydroelectric energy and to unite two nearby lakes, Lake Resia and Lake Curon. In order to complete the project the town was flooded, with the only remnants being a centuries-old bell tower that has partially remained visible above the water. Through this striking visual, the lake gained popularity and even inspired a book and Netflix series.

Now, for the first time in decades, the old town is fully visible. The lake, which lies in South Tyrol, the Alpine region that borders Austria and Switzerland, was temporarily drained to allow for repairs, revealing the remnants of the former village. According to the BBC, locals have been exploring the site, sharing photos and videos of wea...

When a refugee camp becomes a semi-permanent settlement

2019-10-01T14:30:00-04:00

With the prospect of the Rohingya not being able to return to Myanmar for years to come, the prototypes in Camp 4 Extension reflect how aid and relief organizations are finding new ways to manage the long-term needs of the most populous refugee camp in the world.

CityLab reports on the latest efforts to drastically improve living conditions inside Kutupalong Refugee Camp, the world's largest camp of its kind and currently home to more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees that fled from ethnic and religious persecution in Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh.

"Designers in the U.S. are helping to facilitate these dreams for more stable refugee camps," write Victoria Milko and Clare Hammond in their CityLab article about recent design and infrastructure improvements.

"Nadyeli Quiroz and John David Wagner at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design are embarking on a year-long collaboration with OBAT Helpers, an Indianapolis-based community nonprofit, to explore how to create varied functional spaces within the camps, such as outdoor courtyards or provisional pop-up designs."

But making lasting progress is tricky. The Bangladeshi government insists on the temporary status of the camp — emphasizing that its Rohingya population would be returning to My...

Mosul residents fear revamping of Tigris riverfront will erase their historical identity

2019-07-20T09:00:00-04:00

"People know Mosul's Old City by its riverfront - it has some of the city's most important historic features," Fethi added, referring to the city's old wall, the citadel, palaces and other heritage sites along the Tigris' west bank. "It [the council] should aim to preserve Mosul's heritage rather than turn [it] into another Dubai ... an absolute anathema to what should be done."

Two years after Iraqi forces regained full control of Mosul from ISIL, local authorities are pushing a proposal to transform historic neighborhoods along the west bank of the Tigris river into a modernized “new city”, with high rises, large supermarkets and restaurant chains. Al Jazeera spoke with Mosul residents, who believe the plan will erase their historical identity. With some 300,000 residents still displaced, the redevelopment plan doesn't include a budget for rebuilding homes or restoring heritage sites.

“While still a vision for now, local authorities have already begun talks with residents to convince them of the proposal, which, they say, is the only way to redevelop Mosul in the face of limited support from the central government in Baghdad,” Al Jazeera reports. The article states that “Locals and experts alleged that the redevelopment plan was also an effort to manipulate communities into leaving their neighbourhoods”.

"Humanitarian emergency": Michael Greenberg looks inside New York City’s housing crisis

2017-08-01T15:47:00-04:00

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is [...] a “complex emergency”: man-made and shaped by a combination of forces that have led to a large-scale “displacement of populations” from their homes.

"What makes the crisis especially startling," author Michael Greenberg continues in his latest piece for The New York Review of Books, "is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration."

Cameron Sinclair to lead Airbnb humanitarian team for temporary-housing project

2017-04-25T19:47:00-04:00

Sinclair has been working with Airbnb over the past year on various pilot projects, with the official [temporary housing] project launching this summer. The ultimate goal is for one million Airbnb users to register as “hosts for good,” signaling that they will provide housing for people impacted by natural disasters or otherwise displaced.

Sinclair will lead Airbnb's in-house humanitarian team as part of the company's goal to provide free, short-term housing for 100,000 people in need over the next five years. Airbnb announced the #weaccept project in a commercial (linked below) that aired at this year's Super Bowl, not long after Trump's travel ban was issued and also in light of Airbnb guests reporting that they experienced racial discrimination from hosts on the website.

"Ultimately, we failed"—Robert Hammond, co-founder of the High Line, on the park's relationship to the Chelsea community

2017-02-17T12:24:00-05:00

“We were from the community. We wanted to do it for the neighborhood,” states Robert Hammond, a co-founder of the High Line in an interview with City Lab. “Ultimately, we failed.”

The High Line might be popular, but it hasn’t really benefited its adjacent community. Visitors are overwhelmingly tourists—and overwhelmingly white, despite the fact that one-third of the residents of Chelsea are people of color.

In the interview, they discuss the displacements that usually attend such high-profile design interventions, which are increasingly gaining favor in municipal governments.

Charles Leadbeater on the meaning of home in today's culture of rootlessness

2016-12-09T15:20:00-05:00

The tiny house is just one example of the lengths to which people will go to create a sense of home even when they lack the means for it. It’s just one symptom of a much wider and intensifying search for belonging, which makes home as important to politics as the idea of class or rights – especially now, when so many people feel displaced, both literally and figuratively, by life in innovation-driven, high-tech, networked capitalism.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

The end of Shenzhen’s Baishizhou 'urban village'

2016-09-22T15:37:00-04:00

“Village” may not seem like the right term for a cluster of tenement-style walkups that can house more than 100,000 people. Chengzhongcun hang onto the name partly because of the familiarity evoked by the traditions and small-scale businesses that thrive among their migrant populations, and partly because when modern Shenzhen began growing, these places really were just villages in the middle of the city.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Mapping how LA's expanding Metro network fuels gentrification (or not)

2016-09-09T14:01:00-04:00

Researchers from the Urban Displacement project, a joint UCLA and UC Berkeley effort, recently released a gentrification map of Los Angeles. They examined the city from 1990 to 2000 and up to 2015, focusing on neighborhoods near transit stops. The goal was to see if these areas saw higher rents and more displacement than other areas. The answer? Yes — with some exceptions.

Some of the UCLA researchers' key findings for Los Angeles Country (via the project's website, urbandisplacement.org):

Our analysis found that areas around transit stations are changing and that many of the changes are in direction of neighborhood upscaling and gentrification.
Examining the changes from 2000 to 2013, we find that relative to non-transit areas, transit neighborhoods are more associated with higher increases in whites, college educated, higher income households and greater increases in the cost of rent. Conversely, transit neighborhoods are associated with greater losses in disadvantaged populations including individuals with less than a high school diploma and lower income households.
The impacts of changes vary across locations but the biggest impacts seem to be around the Downtown areas where transit-oriented development interacts with other interventions aiming to revitalize the urban form.

Click here for the interactive LA map. — Looking for the SF Bay Area map inste...

As a new class of super rich investors displace the traditional elite, average Londoners are pushed further and further outside the city limits

2016-08-31T14:01:00-04:00

London’s traditional elite, such as lawyers, architects and academics, are being pushed out of their enclaves in Mayfair, Chelsea and Hampstead by an influx of global super rich investors, causing a chain reaction of gentrification across the capital, according to research by the London School of Economics. An influx of ultra-high-net worth overseas buyers is leading the old elite to sell up and move from London’s most exclusive postcodes and buy in areas they previously considered undesirable

While it may be hard to sympathise with the "traditional elite", these displacements set off a chain-reaction, as the affluent middle class moves into neighbourhoods that were once working class. In turn, lower-income Londoners are forced out of the city all together.

For more on the state of London's housing crunch, check out these links:

A tragic tale of live-and-let-die development on Shanghai's Street of Eternal Happiness

2016-08-03T17:00:00-04:00

“One day at around eight in the morning, I was returning from the market when six of the developer’s thugs tackled me outside my home and pushed me into a car,” remembers Xi. Several others, she says, climbed a ladder to her balcony. Xi says she screamed for her husband, but it was too late. There was a scuffle inside, and then black smoke poured out of their balcony window before the house went up in flames. Xi’s husband burned to death, and the developer’s men escaped.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

5 myths about gentrification, according to a GSAPP urban planning professor

2016-06-06T12:57:00-04:00

my research shows that longtime residents aren’t more likely to move when their neighborhood gentrifies; sometimes they’re actually less likely to leave [...] In a 2009 study, I found that gentrifying neighborhoods are more racially diverse than non-gentrifying ones. [...] To be sure, market forces help change commerce in gentrifying neighborhoods. But often lurking behind the “invisible hand” are activists and policymakers who wish to nudge the market to produce certain outcomes.

Lance Freeman's research at GSAPP focuses on issues related to gentrification, affordable housing, and race. Watch the Washington Post's video below, summing up the myths:

Related on Archinect:

New MoMA exhibition explores the architecture of displacement

2016-05-06T18:11:00-04:00

The architecture of forced displacement is the subject of “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter,” a forthcoming exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit will assemble work by architects, designers, and artists responding to the global refugee crisis. Curated by Sean Anderson, MoMA’s associate curator for architecture and design, with curatorial assistant Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, “Insecurities” will include works of design built to help alleviate suffering inside refugee camps.

↑ Interior of a Better Shelter prototype in Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Erbil, Iraq. (Image: Better Shelter, 2015)

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America's first "climate refugees" head for higher ground

2016-05-03T13:33:00-04:00

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems. One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change.

"The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees."

Precisely determining who qualifies as a "climate refugee" is a notoriously difficult challenge. While the UN Refugee Agency estimates 22 million people were displaced by "disasters brought on by natural hazard events," evidence linking, for example, the civil war raging in Syria and Iraq with a prolonged drought would up that number.

In short, it's difficult to clearly isolate environmental factors, which tend to happen on large temporal and geographic scales, from sociopolitical causes of mass displacement, which are often more visible.

In any case, while a sizable chunk of the American government still doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change, its citizens are already being displaced because of its effects....

What Makoko can teach about "organic" urban development

2016-02-25T14:53:00-05:00

'Why can’t communities simply be communities and develop in the organic way that we allow other communities to develop?'...'They are inspirational in that people have developed them themselves, without government and real estate types pushing them around. Without a doubt, they still have problems. But they are stabilising themselves and, over time, knitting themselves into the fabric of their cities. This is a true marvel of global urbanism.'

How Chinese families are handling the country's ongoing mass evictions

2016-01-27T18:16:00-05:00

'My family has lived here for generations. We don’t want the money, we don’t want our house destroyed, we just want to live here,' Mrs. Zhang declared. The physical re-facing of China is cutting some very deep social scars. Abuse of power, corruption, developers in cahoots with government officials, and the misappropriation of funds are rife throughout the eviction and relocation process, littering the country with the seeds of discontent.

Wade Shepard digs into China's ongoing mass evictions and the country's laws that have long enabled such property seizures. While some families were lucky enough to receive compensation to give up their homes, the evictions have been the harshest for those who have lived in the same towns for centuries.

A closer look at the often complicated relationship between placemaking and gentrification

2015-11-12T13:27:00-05:00

Rather than watching passively as non-local or private developers consume neighborhood public spaces, we can use Placemaking to enable citizens to create their own public spaces, to highlight the unique strengths of their neighborhoods, and to address its specific challenges. While gentrification can divide communities and build upon exclusivity, Placemaking is about inclusion and shared community ownership. It is about increasing “quality of life,” not removing public life.

Related on Archinect:

Another Olympics, another story of displacement

2015-10-01T13:00:00-04:00

[...] Team China beat out Team Kazakhstan to host the games. Zhangjiakou, a city of 4 million people in the mountains of Hebei province, will host the games alongside Beijing. [...] They're worried I'll talk to people like Lu Wanku, who will be forced to move to make way for the region’s investment boom. Lu herds cattle and has lived in his tiny brick home for more than 20 years. His home is now in the way of a Four Seasons Town Dream Resort ski run. [...] Lu has two weeks to move out.

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