Assoc. Prof. Bülent Batuman, chair of the Department of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, is the co-editor of “The Urban Refugee: Space, Agency, and the New Urban Condition,” a book recently published by Intellect.
Forced migration has become a hot topic of policy as well as scholarship in the recent years. Researchers have been scrutinizing the relationship between displacement and the built environment. While this line of inquiry has mostly focused on refugee camps and the social and political aspects of temporariness, this volume concentrates on a less explored aspect of displacement, the interaction between refugees and the cities they inhabit. The book underlines the specificity of the urban refugee as well as their spatial agency and investigates the irreversible effect they have on the contemporary urban condition. To this end, the essays, written by authors from diverse disciplines, from architectural history to cultural anthropology and urban planning, shed light on both the specificities of the contemporary urban condition that affect the refugees and the multi-dimensional impact that the refugees have on the city. The book is structured along the three interlinked themes of identity (informality, imagination and belonging), place (transnational homemaking practices) and site (the navigation of urban space), presenting case studies from diverse geographies including Lebanon, France, South Africa, Turkey and the US.
