Akcan, an architect and professor at Cornell, studies this history through the design and occupation of built spaces. For example, Akcan delves into the career of 20th-century Sudanese architect Abdel Moneim Mustafa, who, she persuasively argues, questioned the idea of “tropical architecture” and pursued an alternative climatic modernism. Other figures in the book include those outside the profession who contended with transformations of the built world around them. The second chapter, “Partition,” recounts the story of the early 20th-century population exchanges between southeastern Europe and Anatolia that uprooted countless lives and forced ethnic categories on those whose complex backgrounds defied such division. Akcan follows a Turkish-speaking Christian from Cappadocia and a Muslim from a Macedonian village who were forced to relocate to Greece and Turkey, respectively. To tell this story, she relies on their written remembrances of buildings, landscapes, and relationships left behind, and of the placeless grids of low-quality housing where they were resettled.

Architecture emerges as both antagonist and protagonist. It can be a tool of ecological destruction and political domination, as in a series of extravagant cultural buildings in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district that erased the area’s multicultural history to advance nationalist narratives. But it can also be a medium for cultural connection, as in projects that begins to come into focus through Akcan’s case studies, among which are architectural projects by such architects as Aslı Özbay, who has in recent decades recovered and restored abandoned structures once occupied by Christians in Cappadocia.

In 1964, cave dwellings in Turkey were turned into the luxury Club Med hotel of Cappadocia. Photo © Esra Akcan, 2018. courtesy Duke University Press

Throughout Architecture and the Right to Heal, the thing Akcan suggests we need to heal from most is what she calls “resettler nationalism,” which refers to the role of mass migration in the formation of religious and ethnic nationalism. In the post-Ottoman context, Akcan’s term proves useful in adding to the categories of colonized and colonizer, which don’t map neatly onto millions of resettled people. The term points to the arbitrariness of identities often presented as immutable and to the vengeance that nationalism can acquire in the hands of those whose lives are shattered in its name. One is reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation that those deprived of the rights granted by nationality tend to cling “all the more desperately” to national identity.

Akcan shows that these population exchanges had world-altering reverberations, not only through the nation-states they shaped and the violence they precipitated but also because they became a model for subsequent partitioning—in, for example, British-ruled India and ex-Ottoman Palestine. Reading this book, one cannot help but think of how these dislocations continue to fuel devastating violence, not least in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

What is perhaps most surprising about Architecture and the Right to Heal, given its grim subject, is that at its core it retains optimism. Akcan is steadfast in her belief in a future not defined by the division and destruction of this history but by interconnection. This is not an imminent future, but by describing the spaces and ways of occupying them that could enable its realization, she renders it a possible one. “A critical history of partition,” she writes, needs to “reclaim cosmopolitan ethics as a prerequisite for a new culture of welcoming and peace.”