INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE
COHABITATION, DWELLING AND INHABITING ONTOLOGIES Camillo Boano The Bartlett Development Planning Unit / Faculty of the Built Environment University College London / UK
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Here my intention was to reflect on the potential generative and conflicting nature of architecture understood as cultural and aesthetic practice conjoined the urgent global challenge of refugeness. Universally across the globe refugeness speaks differently but directly to the challenges that define our present conditions and possible urban futures: social inequality, segregation, identity, ecological crisis, displacement, privatization and security, expansion of borders and urban forms. And therefore, speaks to the potential paradox that architectural thoughts have: understanding and reframing refugee experiences as spatial enactment, as live experience that acknowledge the transformative agency refugees have on the very substance of “urban life”. Framing refugeness as housing and urbanism, or to paraphrase Fawaz “refugeness as urbanism” issue might help to critically disentangle the attention from the problematic asymmetrical and colonial approach to migration and refugees that
words like ‘integration’ and ‘hospitality’, at least in the current and populistic use, are suggesting moving to a more fluid and integrated version of agency and transformative experiences embedded in the urban places where inhabitation is a moment an event in the process of social integration within the city: an urbanism of inhabiting. If displacement is the defining characteristic of the era in which we live, hospitality does seem to be its diagram in space. Hospitality has paved the way to become a register, a tactic to open for a process of differentiation from people who were not used to signify the ‘other’. This is particularly evident in situation in sites and territories that reveals the ‘multiplicity of forced migration regimes’ operating historically and contemporaneously (Lebanon with Palestinian and Syrian, Acheniese with Rohinga, etc). This performative dimension allows sketching another preliminary conclusion: integration does not happen in a vacuum; it does need space or,
