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Amro Sallam helped start Architects for Society in 2015, gathering together a collective of international architects to focus their work on humanitarian and social-welfare projects. One of their first projects, Hex House, is a solar-powered, single-family unit designed for deployment in refugee... View full entry
If we imagine one's escape to a refugee camp as fragmentary, provisional and incomplete, the camp must be transformed not only in design but also in its role as a catalyst for promoting the humanity of those living within its barbed-wired walls. [...]
Architecture has become the litmus test of society's capacity for holistic and compassionate security.
— cnn.com
For more on the architectural experience of refugees:Kenya moves to shut down Dadaab, the world's biggest refugee campNew MoMA exhibition explores the architecture of displacementAi Weiwei documents life in Greek refugee camp on social mediaThe vast majority of Syrian refugees are seeking refuge... View full entry
In the latest attempt from a big city to move away from car hegemony, Barcelona has ambitious plans. Currently faced with excessive pollution and noise levels, the city has come up with a new mobility plan to reduce traffic by 21%. And it comes with something extra: freeing up nearly 60% of streets currently used by cars to turn them into so-called “citizen spaces”. — The Guardian
"The plan is based around the idea of superilles (superblocks) – mini neighbourhoods around which traffic will flow, and in which spaces will be repurposed to “fill our city with life”, as its tagline says."A precedent for Barcelona's superblocks was actually... View full entry
Green Light is an artistic workshops that responds to the current situation in Europe, in which countless refugees are caught up in legal and political limbo. Together with TBA21 in Vienna, Olafur Eliasson has invited people from different backgrounds – refugees and locals – to take part in... View full entry
Next month, media organizations in the Bay Area are planning to put aside their rivalries and competitive instincts for a day of coordinated coverage on the homeless crisis in the city. [...]
“We want the full force of the Fourth Estate to bear down on this problem” [...]
“You will not be able to log onto Facebook, turn on the radio, watch TV, read a newspaper, log onto Twitter without seeing a story about the causes and solutions to homelessness”
— nytimes.com
A fascinating effort in "solutions-oriented journalism", coordinating efforts across 30 media organizations to fully devote one day of coverage to the Bay Area's homelessness problem. While some organizations will report on the issue as they otherwise might, others will propose direct hypotheses... View full entry
For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income.
This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.
— the New York Times
"Geographic segregation dovetails with the growing economic spread between the top 20 percent and the bottom 80 percent: The top quintile is, in effect, disengaging from everyone with lower incomes."In related news:Urban fingerprints reveal a city's fundamental character and compositionBuying... View full entry
Kenya has vowed to close the world’s biggest refugee camp within a year and send hundreds of thousands of Somalis back to their war-torn homeland or on to other countries, a plan decried by aid and human rights groups as dangerous, illegal and impractical.
Kenya says it needs to close the sprawling Dadaab camp, home to 330,000 mostly Somali refugees, to protect the country’s security after a string of terror attacks by al-Shabaab.
— The Guardian
With most of Europe and the Middle East grappling with an unprecedented refugee crisis, it's easy to lose sight of the millions of other displaced peoples around the world. But the largest population of refugees isn't in Germany, Sweden, or France.Rather, with a population of... View full entry
That an apple can travel over 11,500 miles from where it was grown (spending over a year in shipment and in toxic, low-oxygen storage to suspend its maturation) is the perfect object lesson of our global agricultural system’s failures. [...]
And with the advent of natural-resource scarcity, flattening yields, loss of biodiversity, changing climates, environmental degradation, and booming urban populations, we’re hurtling toward its natural limit.
— Near Future
"What if we could build a different world? One in which anyone could farm anywhere, not just on land devastated by disaster, but in basements, skyscrapers, and abandoned subway tunnels? Or in classrooms, rooftops, and old factories?"In this article by Caleb Harper, the Director of the Open... View full entry
“Architecture is one of the most important things that we have to help communities shape themselves, both literally and figuratively,” Treviño says. “However, when we start talking about the leaders of the community, most often you have people without an architectural background.”
As local leaders, architects can bring an objective, analytical perspective to the organizations that run their communities. And there’s already widespread interest among practitioners in making a difference.
— Architect Magazine
This month, in line with the ideas behind the upcoming Venice Biennale, Archinect's coverage includes a special themed section, Help, featuring content that focuses on the social and political components of the discipline.Here's some relevant coverage:New MoMA exhibition explores the... View full entry
“How can you morally and ethically justify in your own mind working on a project that would take people accustomed to living on the ground, of having their gardens, chickens, and their little animals in their yards, having space around them, having flowers, to live in these twenty-four... View full entry
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.
— citylab.com
↑ Interior of a Better Shelter prototype in Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Erbil, Iraq. (Image: Better Shelter, 2015)Related stories in the Archinect news:Ai Weiwei documents life in Greek refugee camp on social media"Nobody thinks about the safety of these women": the harrowing experiences of female... View full entry
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 New York Times
"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... View full entry
Inspired by recent conversations concerning architecture's engagement in social and humanitarian issues, as well as "Reporting from the Front", Alejandro Aravena's theme for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, Archinect is adopting the special editorial theme of "Help" for the month of... View full entry
Los Angeles-based designers Sofia Borges and Susan Nwankpa recently collaborated in a photo exhibition titled "HOME(less)". Currently at the University of Southern California, the exhibition spotlights L.A.'s ongoing homelessness crisis in an interestingly positive manner. Borges and Nwankpa took... View full entry
