Architecture and Migration

Migration has always been central to the built environment and its histories. Every city and every landscape have been shaped by humans and non-humans who moved, whether by choice, circumstance, or necessity, transporting objects, knowledge, cultural practices and environmental processes that became integrated into their new homes. Yet architectural historiography has accounted little for the agency that migrants wield as builders, laborers, participants, users, caretakers, and patrons in the cities and landscapes they inhabit, let alone the non-human actors that contribute to creating our shared environment. Thus, the central and collective ambition of the group is to cultivate research methods, theories, and strategies to study environments of migration as well as migration itself as a site. This migration is often of people across political borders, yet it can also signify the movement of ideas, plants, animals, seeds, systems, and more.

We advance narratives that offer migration as a method of understanding the past and conceiving built environments as places to be felt as much as seen. We prioritize wider considerations and definitions of “archives” and “heritage” to capture intergenerational and ecological knowledge that is often embedded in migrant communities and built environments. In this respect, we question fundamental assumptions about how definitions of cities have reinforced the oversight of migration’s centrality and aim to propose histories and other creative modalities to account for the material ways in which migrants and migration make place. The group’s primary activity focuses on monthly meetings where we read and discuss texts. Our research shares the goals and practices of public humanities and community-engaged research, with an ethical commitment to the communities we study.