147 Architectures of Migration, Techniques of Citizenry (I)

Architectures of Migration, Techniques of Citizenry
Friday, March 30, 2018: 9:00 AM-10:45 AM
Holabird (InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile)
Home, camp, wall, sanctuary and territory are but a few architectural typologies that are as crucial to processes of migration as they are to the politics of citizenry that invariably derive from these processes. For while essentially a legal category, citizenship is also a spatial condition: stubbornly linked to the territorial nature of the nation-state or the continental-federation, determined by the constructed and violent nature of their borders, and crucially challenged by the relocation of populations in the move. This symposium probes the architectural dimension of migration and citizenry. It does so by offering a series of critical reflections on the ways in which narratives about and designs of the built environment have conditioned and constructed migration and on how architecture—a regulatory institution charged with the imagining of place as well as the actual rooting and uprooting of populations—has variously helped preconceive, redefine, govern or deny citizenry. Papers explore, among others, how camps brought colonial campaigns to bear in French Algeria, how housing determined refugee movements in Syria, and how domestic and urban designs defined the migration of workers within fascist regimes in Southern Europe and across the Mediterranean. The symposium frames both ‘Europe’ and the migrant broadly, from the asylum seeker and the settler to the rural migrant and the professional elites—subjects whose spatial histories reveal the mechanisms of violence and exclusion, the narratives of territorial essentialism, and the forms of coercion that continue to determine physical and discursive constructs of displacement to the day.
Chair:
Maria Gonzalez Pendas
Discussant :
Ayala Levin
Nomad Interiors for the African Colonies, 1936-1943
Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Barnard College
European-American Emigres and Modern Architectures in Canada
Michelangelo Sabatino, Illinois Institute of Technology