The number of people displaced by violence and conflict in 2024, according to UNHCR, stands conservatively at 63 million. Yet as political, climatic and economic factors conspire to produce unprecedented emergencies, any estimate is tenuous at best. In this generous conversation, architectural scholars Dubravka Sekulić and Shumi Bose speak with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi — author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (2023, Duke University Press) — on the spatial realities consequent to ever-shifting flows and settlements.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Terra Infirma."

SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ Thank you for making time to talk about and around the architecture of migration; it’s an honour to have both of you. Anooradha, you’ve been working on the subject of migration — and specifically on the Dadaab camps — for quite a long time. Dubravka, thank you for joining me in speaking with Anoo about her research: I understand you’ve been reading and using her work in your teaching for some time.

DUBRAVKA SEKULIĆ Yes I’ve been waiting for this conversation for years. Anooradha, I’ve learned so much from your work even before the book came out, and from your demonstration of the attitudes with which one might bring practice and pedagogy together. I’m also impressed that you have managed to make such a careful book with such generosity with an academic press; from the treatment of images and captions, to making it fully open access.

ANOORADHA IYER SIDDIQIIt is humbling to be in this conversation with you; this concept of mutual learning is really important to me. Beyond this idea of pedagogy and practice — and in your own work — you’ve touched on something more scholarly and intellectual: a feminist problem of what to do with riotous women who don't conform to the standards of intellectual discourse, with those who carry their intellectual lives in a way that is not only nonconformist, but that actually breaks down structures that have been carefully built up in the academy over generations. There are many examples of how to do this, but as you know, architecture and its allied fields are often far behind. The forms of durability in retaining a riotously dissonant, even disobedient approach have, to me, been really instructive.

AIS In some ways, I was always going to write a book about migration. Formally, the book was set into motion in 2010, during the final part of my PhD. That year, I went to Geneva to work in the UNHCR archive for the first time. Even at that moment, this word migration was so easy to ignore — especially for those of us working in the humanities or on aesthetics; it was used more readily in applied social sciences and policy. It had become so vacuous that we now see it only as a label applied to certain kinds of people and certain kinds of spaces. From the very beginning, I found myself steeped in wanting to regenerate that term.

An architecture of migration allows a double paradox. It allows us to see architecture in a fundamentally different way than we imagine — because we are typically facing landed architectures and landed archives that give us the architectural history we know. But architecture really allowed me to shine a very different light on migration. Migration is really only understood in critical terms as carceral; generally, it's not viewed as anything but pathological. A pathology, to my mind, catches the attention because it exists over a long period of time; it doesn't go away. When things have a long arc, you can always look at them from below; for instance, those people are not actually criminals, those are people being narrated as criminals. The narration of these terms was the very first thing I started thinking about in 2010.

Yet it was never my aim to analyse an actual camp or the history of Africa, although I was steeped in both of those things. For me, the project was always somewhat discursive. I think that the opportunity to regenerate certain terms — like migration — is laid at our feet now: our field is now in a place where we can actually hold fairly complex and nuanced ideas. So bringing architecture into a larger humanities discourse, and also complicating migration beyond a critique of structural agency — the fundamental critiques that emerge from critical humanitarian studies, for example — became important to me. That's the larger project.

I do think this book has drawn from African ways of knowing; ways of knowing developed in Africa and through the African diaspora. The experience of Blackness and global Blackness theory has undergirded so much of my own intellectual experience, as well as the theory in this book. These are generative and generous ways of understanding the world. Many of the Black feminists that I identify closely with — particularly African feminists — offer such a deep well for all of us, for our field of architectural studies, theory, and history. I began to see Dadaab through these lenses, and to understand how people on the ground in Dadaab are truly the avant garde; they have shown us ways to live that — frankly — we are all going to have to come to terms with far sooner than we wish.

DS There is something inherent in Black and especially African feminism; an embodied, grounded thinking which is in relation to land and body. The importance of thinking from this embeddedness, embodiedness, from the ground, informs the way you introduce architectural understanding. I want to question the notion of architectural study as a method, before connecting that to the way you see design.

AISThere’s often an understanding that an architectural study has to be rooted in the concrete effects, the particular, in order to gain knowledge that is universal. There's a universality in looking for the specifics, right? I have always been a little bit resistant to that —

KOOZ You mean, you’re resistant to the idea of studying particulars, in order to generate knowledge that could be applied universally?

AISI think I’m resistant to narrating “particulars” in this provincialising way. I have obviously studied the particulars of Dadaab, for example — to a relatively uncommon depth. The point that I'm making is that, for me, there's a real problem with viewing something simply as a particularity, from which to gather a universal.

DS This is key. What you do so powerfully is to recognise the agency of space; the architectural study emerges in relation to space. This opens up ways of understanding and probing a subject like migration.

AISYou know, I‘ve worked as an architect in India, and in many parts of the world I can figure out how things are built, how they're sourced; I can see a built environment and actually understand something about the past, how it has come to be. It's taken me a long time to actually understand that that is a very specific skill that lots of people don't bring to places — not everybody thinks like this. I think that is how we — people trained in architectural or spatial practice — think differently.

The goal of this book is to put this approach in dialogue with those of historians or anthropologists — alongside the books that we find ourselves reading, because we turn to these other disciplines to learn. We might also note that architecture isn't just any old particular; neither is East Africa. Standing on the ground somewhere is actually really important; it really is a different attitude that has to do with constructing as much intimacy as possible with a place, with a site, with people — with everything that makes an architecture. There's got to be a different way to talk about this.

KOOZ Maybe you can tell us about the ways in which you fostered some of these intimacies while doing your research. To what extent did you alter your methods and tone, for what is ultimately an academic publication?

AISI relied on some pretty basic academic tenets. I was trained as an art historian, and I think that anthropology and art history have particular methods of looking closely: you use a variety of different kinds of sources, both documentary and material, in order to build a body of evidence. What I did was as basic as that, as a method.

But to spend twelve years rather than three years doing something really changes things. There were a few issues when conducting oral histories: even when people gave me permission for interviews, there was no way to know if I could endanger people with what I wrote. There's always a nagging feeling of responsibility that accompanies the respect for people’s agency to freely express themselves when they talk to you. A long duration for the project allowed these and other thoughts to reconcile themselves.

For instance, I fall asleep every night with these images; every photograph in this book has lived with me for a long time, they have their own life. For me, the sheer breathtaking quality to this landscape — that region is so stark and so beautiful — which was so dissonant to the human struggles that are perpetuated on that land, due in part to the agendas of the US government. Nowadays, it is very common to hear critiques of the US military complex, but in 2010, it was not common in art history programmes. US-style state militarism is so radically impacting the lives of so many people, creating conditions where their homes are being remotely bombed, where people are left with little option but to join armies; their children are joining armies. This is why a lot of people I met had fled Somalia.

Part of using intimacy with architecture as a method for studying was that it allowed me to follow activities in small spaces — following people very closely as they built something like a restaurant or a shelter, or even larger buildings. There's a perceived innocence in studying how things are built, how they are designed, and how space is planned. In fact, the physical planning process was perceived as innocent enough that planning records were among the only documents that the UNHCR didn't classify; they were not considered to be sensitive. I found this to be a subtle opportunity to use a “benign” set of art historical methods — which allow you to subvert the way you look at things — to enter into the politics of a space without having to announce it as such.

The passage of time has, as a bottom line, allowed me to publish these photographs; it allowed me to sit with the material long enough and also let it go; it allowed the children in the photos to age beyond recognition. People who are not themselves incarcerated, but who work with incarcerated populations, deal regularly with the urgent problem of collaboration between the inside and the outside. Nation-state borders need to be a bigger discussion within the broader abolition debate. For me, border-crossing is the number one problem. We have to learn to live together on this earth. As we think about our urgent, existential climate issues, to live together, we have to stop creating borders and incarcerating some people so that others can supposedly be free. The book is one small methodological attempt to do this bridging between the inside and the outside.

DSIt's actually about refusing separation, which I think defines the position of your work. There is also a lot of care labour being done in this book. I’m thinking of the ways in which you study archives, but also in your observations of domesticity, articulating what you call “insurgent domesticity”.

When you look at something like a refugee camp, although it is supposed to be an icon of shelter or hospitality, in fact it simply marks a border. That's really what we understand; even when you hear the term refugee camp, it is very casually racialised; its inhabitants are very casually criminalised. It's easy for these colonial definitions, quietly and quickly, to rule the way we think of a space like this. Dadaab is not a place we think of when imagining the great monumental architectures of the world. But indeed these are great monumental architectures; some of the work in Dadaab is so striking. That too is a very dissonant and shocking thing to acknowledge, when you're looking at a provisional shelter: to witness such arrestingly beautiful architecture. The sheer aesthetic power of that can force us out of liberal traps of thought, but it can be hard to admit, because we expect to have certain opinions about certain kinds of things.

Once we really understand partitioning as the foundation for a place, we can then very easily see that that architecture works to sedentarise people who would otherwise live migratory lives. That sedentarisation is at the core of this book. Land struggles have been at the core of African anti-colonialism, and anti-colonialism in so many parts of the world; for example, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army crystallised the country’s struggle. Understanding this idea that forms of sedentarisation were imposed on people who would not otherwise be living in a settled way was part of a learning process for me.

Not everyone lives in a migratory tradition as do some of the people in the Horn of Africa. But it's very useful for us to think with people who have refused some of the most basic tenets of the Western-style nation-state, refusing to set up governments the way they were supposed to, based on being sedentarised. In the 1990s, you would hear Somalia described as a so-called ‘failed state’. I always asked myself, what are they failing at? I think we can see that they failed only at participating in this capitalistic, nation-state structure. This way of understanding the settlement or the active sedentarisation of migratory people, growing out of partitions, can bring us to a point where we can start to talk differently about shelter.

One thing we don't read about is that UNHCR camps are typically built and created by women, or women and children. Able-bodied refugee men often find themselves with other options. In contrast to these conditions on the ground, I started realising that we — in architecture — really have a pattern of not permitting domesticity to enter the picture. As if domesticity is just too complicated; it can't be described by architecture as we know it. But domesticity itself is a form of insurgency, in the face of carceral oppression. Domesticity is what erupts out of borders; it doesn't stay confined. The term “insurgent domesticities”, which comes up in Chapter 3, is also the name of a collaborative group I have worked with for many years, from whom I've learned so much. It was important to me to acknowledge domesticity as the basis of all these other things. To borrow Lillian Chee's words, it's so important to understand the effect of things that don't get to have a shape.

DSThere is a kinship between that and questions of who decides what is understood as heritage, who or what is allowed to narrate its own history, or to be recognised in its presence. As you have written, humanitarian architecture often presents itself as temporary, in order to pose less of a threat to extant structures. What does it mean to develop this concept of critical heritage, in relation to how life is lived and embodied?

AISI’ve been trying to access this problem of critical heritage as a sort of foundational pedagogy for some time. Even for those of us who are very open to this idea, it is hard to imagine the fleeing mother, who becomes an asylum seeker, as the expert — as someone whom we might cite alongside theorists in our literature. I have really been trying to work on what it means to be an expert — even if we don't use that word — of critical heritage. What if what you are really theorising is a domesticity and the thing that makes it up is the gathering or custodianship of heritage and inheritance — but one that is intangible, social, ecological, not always legible or recognisable. What does it mean to be the bearer of a heritage at the extreme and very full edges of domesticity? I really wanted to put that on the table too; to demand that we take the problem of critical heritage seriously.

Many people are starting to look at architectural history and environmental history together; how settlement occurs within a certain ecosystem. That literature is arriving in different ways, through many different fields, but we're just on the cusp. Spatial scholars of colonialism are doing this work — you probably know Rafico Ruiz's book, Slow Disturbance — projects like this are helping us to slowly find ways in which to recognise embodied heritage. There are built structures that hold, in certain ways, a timeline of events or longer histories that are less easily articulated. That is really the direction I would like to see for our field, moving forward; I'd like to see architectural historians and theorists really taking ownership of that problem of long, ecologically-entangled histories.

The biggest takeaway for me, in understanding Dadaab, was in reversing my own understanding of monumentality; understanding that a site like this is a monument, even in the most conventional definition. It really is a marker of heritage; yes, a deeply East African heritage, but even in the language of the World Monuments Fund, it belongs to all of us, it’s a common heritage — just look how many people and systems it takes to produce it. That alone is a global story. In all these different ways that intersect with bureaucratic definitions, Dadaab is a heritage site. I've written various articles that argue this; it still always feels a bit speculative and theoretical, but I really do believe it.

KOOZ Have you felt any pressure for your research in terms of it being instrumentalised or made explicitly useful; for instance, providing any clear suggestions for ‘improvements’ for camps and migration processes?

AISThis is not really a book about ‘improvements’ and while this is different from what you are asking, I will say that there has been a radical change in reception to this work, from the beginning to the end. The big surge of interest came in 2015, when the horrors in Syria had occurred and suddenly, the problematics of the refugee camp came again to Europe. Within a European milieu, there was an interest in understanding camps within the sweep of European modernity. This issue of whether something is a ‘worthy subject’ — or whether you are the worthy person to study that subject — if this book does anything, I would like it to shift that attitude.

DS It's not by chance that we have disciplines that we have structured to exclude each other and so much besides. Spatial intelligence exists outside of the disciplinary. The separation of people from their own spatial intelligence diminishes their capacity to act as political subjects.

The book ends by opening up the notion of authorship, with a series of commissioned artworks. This underlines the collaborative way of thinking and doing that I always associate with you, which is connected to the question of solidarity. How did that come about?

AISWell, I didn't start in 2010 imagining that the book would come back to artists. I used to be an artist. I don't do that work anymore; one day, I'll get back to it. But I struggled with the lack of literature that could be relevant; I found myself moving more and more toward nonverbal and other aesthetic forms of expression, as a way to begin to understand and make sense of this place. This is a scholarly problem in writing African architectural histories; for me, there is not yet an encapsulated body of literature that I could turn to.

But in terms of ending the book: if the arguments within it are really true, then they could be taken up by others who work in multiple modes. Those arguments can be carried through in radically different ways. So the artists I approached were kind enough to engage; they are architects and artists with robust practices, whom I felt would take on this challenge, which they did in the Afterword, so beautifully. They gave examples of ways to do scholarship beyond words; our major works of scholarship — our expertise — need not be the punctuation mark at the end of a project. An even more beautiful thing is that since the book has come out, I’ve been working with all these artists and some others to put together an exhibition, which we're calling “Dadaab Commons”, which will open in March 2025, at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi.

Being in dialogue with artists has been a really revelatory experience for me. It goes back to how we use our architectural and spatial studies to open up the humanities, as much as we use the humanities to open up architectural study. What if we allowed these living forms to be our archives and to carry our narratives forward?

DS I’m reminded of a metaphor about the wind from Walter Benjamin, and of The Common Wind, by Julius S. Scott — the wind that carried the spirit of the Haitian Revolution through the Caribbean and still carries on through anticolonial struggles today. I think that this book is like the wind.

AISBeautiful. Thank you so much.

Bios

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an assistant professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2023), which conceptualises architectures of migration and the problematics of settlement through the object lesson of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Her scholarship aims to foreground histories of marginalised people and figures and promote practices of collaboration and support, especially concerning the lives and narratives of communities that have been systematically excluded or silenced. Thinking through objects, buildings, and landscapes, her work examines intellectual histories and diverse forms of esthetic practice and cultural production.

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her research explores transformations of contemporary cities, at the nexus between the production of space, laws, and economy. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-aligned Movement. She is a researcher for the project Curatorial Design: A place between and as a co-editor of the relational digital publication Total Reconstruction. She is the author of several books including Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012); more recently she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on Don't Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored the spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.