Spring 2026, Harvard GSD
This publication brings together the work produced in a project-based seminar instructed by Malkit Shoshan, examining migration trends driven by climate and conflict, which often intersect, in one of the world’s most volatile hotspots: the Sahel, with field research contributed by FAST.
The seminar sits within a broader context of accelerating climate displacement. As extreme climate zones and uninhabitable areas expand over the coming decades, water stress, food insecurity, extreme heat, sea level rise, and weather-related disasters are driving instability and displacement at an unprecedented scale. As of 2024, an estimated 123 million people are displaced worldwide (UNHCR), a number projected to rise significantly, disproportionately affecting those least responsible for the climate crisis.
The work gathered here situates this global trend within the Sahel’s specific history: a region shaped by the root causes and multidimensional consequences of climate change, colonization, extensive resource extraction, conflict, and militarization. It tracks how local, national, and international actors are developing policies and protocols for humanitarian contingency planning in response to new migration patterns, while also examining how traditional lifestyles such as nomadic pastoralism and transhumance have thrived for millennia under extreme conditions, offering lessons in adaptability and perseverance amid crisis and scarcity.
The course revolves around four questions:
- What can we learn about the future of climate migration from these forced displacement trends and rich local cultures, and how can they intersect with international interventions?
- How can multi-temporal, multi-scalar spatial analysis and climate vulnerability projections help us understand a planet in constant flux, one in which national territorial constraints may be transcended, while still preserving lifestyles, construction techniques, materiality, and habitat typologies?
- How can we forge regenerative relationships with broader ecological and environmental conditions defined by commons and collective resource management?
- What do these insights teach us about architecture and urban planning, and how can they challenge our own discipline, pedagogy, and relationship to spatial production?
The course and projects are informed by theory and practice, with diverse contributions including representatives from United Nations agencies such as UNHCR, UN-Habitat, and UNICEF, and WASH actors, who bring real-time data and field experience. Drawing on their datasets, on field research conducted by FAST, and in dialogue with local NGOs, community representatives, designers, scientists, and other experts, the class developed the spatial design strategies presented here, grounded in a case study of climate migration in the Sahel. Special attention goes to Mauritania, where local and international organizations are collaborating to support the country’s open-door policy toward refugees from the region, while developing new protocols that are giving rise to innovative spatial organizations.
Spatial Design Strategies for Climate Migration is available to read GSD’s issuu page, among many other reports.
Instructor
Malkit Shoshan
Teaching Assistant
Spurty KamathCayden Abu-Arja
Students
Adin Becker, Joseph Fujinami, Laiqa Gitosuputro, Ralph Lin, Cecilia Portillo
Contribution by UN Agencies include:
UNPBF: Diane Myriam A Sheinberg
UN Habitat: Mathias Spaliviero;
UNHCR: Rakesh Gupta Nuchanametla Ramasubbaiah, Abdulaye Sy, Vasiliki Tsioutsiou; and
UNICEF: Nathalie Daries and Karin Heissler
