Despite the best efforts of global capital and the Internet to erase boundaries between countries, citizenship—and its attendant rights—still is defined by geography. The world’s 10 million refugees, then, occupy intermediate places where everything from basic services to a sense of dignity is defined by design. Since these schemes rarely transcend the minimal requisites of survival, we asked three architects to imagine enlightened alternatives to the tent cities and training centers that tend to dot the refugee landscape today, either in the architects’ own neighborhoods or abroad. Each of these participants has earned social-responsibility stripes. Oslo-based firm Code has realized 24 units of transitional housing for homeless Norwegians, which blends elegantly into the capital city’s Moss neighborhood. Melbourne, Australia’s PHOOEY Architects recently completed a playground for child residents of public housing in South Melbourne. And Deborah Gans of New York was cocreator of a shipping-pallet design honored in Architecture for Humanity’s 1999 competition for emergency housing for refugees returning to Kosovo.
Code Transit City
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