UNFOLD: Architecture of Migration
Tue 12 Mar 2024 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Department of Architecture, Classroom, CB2 1PX
Description
In this talk, we are joined by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, who will be speaking about her recent book Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (2024). In Architecture of Migration she examines how the refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partitions, sedentarizations, domesticities, and migrations.
Join us in person between 1:00pm and 2:00pm, in the Classroom at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture, next Tuesday March 12.
This event will also be held online, through the following link:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/94177600209?pwd=UXNOeG1BbENRNWZEYm8rRnI5VHVvZz09
We look forward to seeing you there!
Location
Department of Architecture, Classroom, CB2 1PX