Cooperation

The UIC Barcelona School of Architecture aims to offer subjects with a clear commitment to society, both on its Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture and on its Master’s programmes. For this reason, we offer compulsory Cooperation I and Cooperation II subjects to 4th year students.

The Master’s Degree in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture, a member of the Erasmus Mundus Urbano consortium, is an advanced master’s degree programme that prepares architects to develop and rebuild communities affected by rapid urbanisation, poverty, conflict and natural disasters. It is delivered jointly by four European universities: Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU-Darmstadt) —as the coordinating university for the consortium—, Université Pierre Mendès France (UPMF), the Universita degli Studi Roma Tour Vegata and the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture.

Fieldtrip 2019: Exploring refugee integration in Thessaloniki, Greece

The current humanitarian crisis in the Middle-East has worsened the long process of forced migration over the last few decades. The effect of this mass immigration had an impact on many European countries at an urban scale, due to the rapid influx of refugees. As a result, urban contexts have become important sites to interrogate spaces built by and for refugees in European cities. By adopting a political agenda of closed borders, the EU approach determines and controls the conditions under which thousands of political and economic refugees are now trapped in mainland Greece or detained in camps.

This year, students from the Master’s Degree in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture programme travelled to Thessaloniki, Greece, to explore urban strategies that strive for the social and spatial integration of refugees in a sustainable manner in order to prevent the conflicts that arise from the perceived notion of refugees as an economic and social burden.

Thessaloniki launched its resilience strategy in March 2017, —the first Greek city to undertake a long-term plan — and it may serve as model for the integration of refugees in cities across Europe where many refugees resort to living on the street in the hope of finding work opportunities and a return to normal life.

During the workshop we met with the main NGOs working in the area and shared our analysis and

proposals with the Thessaloniki municipal group Arrival Cities Urban Response Team. In the workshop, we collaborated with the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), and were joined by students from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

Students focused on the area around the Thessaloniki Railway station and Michail Kalou street in Thessaloniki, Greece, as a case study to create proposals on how to transform and improve urban voids or ‘areas in urban transition’ by mixing social and physical strategies.