Architecture and Migration

This working group focuses on the ways in which migration, diaspora, and movement has always been central to the built environment and its histories. Every city and every landscape has been shaped by people who moved from one place to another, whether by choice or circumstance, transporting with them objects, knowledge and cultural practices that became integrated into their new homes. Yet, the historiography has little accounted for the agency and knowledge that migrants wield as laborers, participants, users, caretakers, and patrons in the cities and landscapes they inhabit. Thus, the central and collective goal of this group is to develop new narratives of movement and new methodologies of architectural, urban, and landscape research that can critically examine and account for migration in our built environments. In this respect, we question fundamental assumptions about how definitions of cities have reinforced this oversight, and to propose histories and other creative modalities to account for the material ways in which migrants make place.