Built environment professionals find it difficult to engage in the urban crisis dialogue, and lack entry points to contribute their expertise, and while humanitarian and development actors now welcome their participation, the history of spatial contributions in crisis contexts might explain some of the reasons for why the two sectors are not working better together: a common perception that the Shelter should be the main deliverable. The world is more complex than that, but so is the expertise inherent in the diverse built environment sector.
Building Coastal Resilience By Impactful Community Engagement is a lecture by Magdalena Ayed. In this talk, Magdalena, Executive Director, will discuss how Harborkeepers, a small grassroots coastal environmental advocacy non-profit is building coastal resilience in East Boston through impactful coastal programming, trust-based community engagement and through cross-sector partnership-building. The speaker will highlight the model of engagement they have developed that is breaking traditional urban planning ‘siloes’ and helping to foster critical connections that help build sustainable coastal resiliency.
The post-2008 austerity measures imposed on Greece made public space in the city of Athens the prime target of economic development and city marketing. These processes are based on aesthetic strategies of ‘cleaning up’ and imposing a certain visual order while disposing signs of deprivation and exclusion in the streets. Public space is embellished, cleaned, and redeveloped not as the result of prosperity but as an instigator of financial investment. Referencing the work of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière and illustrating a series of cases, this presentation will demonstrate how this exclusionary ‘police order’ of neoliberal consensus confirms and reinforces the borders between the visible and invisible, acceptable and unacceptable. Simultaneously, however, activist groups and civil society initiatives, which have flourished in the post-2008 period, also use public space as the primary arena to contest its privatization and beautification. These actions put forward a more democratic aesthetics of redistribution, based on difference, which emerges as soon as the implemented order meets the world of complexity, boundaries, and resistance.
In this lecture, Shoshan will present case studies from Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory’s (FAST) ongoing investigations and engagements with conflict and post-conflict areas. On the intersection of research and design activism, Shoshan will examine how global and national processes and policies contribute to the formation of the built environment. With a focus on border dynamics, migration and systemic segregation, FAST’s projects explore the agency of design in supporting and enacting actions of solidarity.
The Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) is an Amsterdam- and New York-based architectural think-tank that initiates and develops cross-disciplinary research, advocacy, and design projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and human rights. FAST is directed by Malkit Shoshan.
The second symposium in the ANCB programme Borders and Territories: Identity in Place with Nadine Godehardt, Malkit Shoshan, and Lucas Verweij.
The Global Alliance for Urban Crises is a global, multi-disciplinary and collaborative community of practice. It is a ‘network of networks’ working to prevent, prepare for and effectively respond to humanitarian crises in urban settings.
To read more: http://dimensionsofcitizenship.org/form-n-x00/malkit-shoshan/
The Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), the Center on International Cooperation (CIC), and the Permanent Missions of the United Kingdom, Liberia and Australia are pleased to invite you to a presentation of preliminary findings and recommendations related to the project “UN Peacekeeping Missions in Urban Environments: The Legacy of UNMIL.”
On April 30, 2018, FAST hosted together with the NYU Center on International Cooperation a brainstorming event to discuss the impact and legacy of peace operations on cities with a focus on Liberia.
The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, triggered by the UN mission there, killed more than 9,000 people and affected nearly 807,000. This disastrous case drew attention to the negative effect UN peace operations can have on the surrounding communities and environment—something peacekeepers had started paying attention to with the deployment of new large-scale operations in the 2000s. As operations have grown in size, so too has the size of their environmental footprint.
This report looks at the environmental impact of peace operations and how the UN has responded, including through policies and guidelines, dedicated staff, and training material. In particular, it assesses the challenges the Department of Field Support faces in implementing its Environment Strategy.
Based on this assessment, which includes a detailed examination of the UN mission in Mali, the report puts forward a series of short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations. It concludes that a UN presence should not be a source of stress but should improve local environmental sustainability and build resilience.