The so labelled “refugee crisis” might no longer hit the headlines, however forced displacement is on the rise globally. While the events in the Mediterranean last week - when the far-right Italian government shutdown the ports to the humanitarian refugee rescue ships carrying hundreds, and the more recent ones at the US-Mex border remind us that moments like World Refugee Day are increasingly important in the current political turn.
We celebrate the World Refugee Day with the launch of the 10th volume of the BUDDlab, a pamphlet that documents and reflects upon the complex and contested reality of hospitality and asylum policy, politics and practice in Italy. During a 3-day workshop held in February in Brescia, a medium size city that has become a migrant city in the past decades, MSc BUDD students were tasked to engage with a variety of stakeholders to develop design strategies that uncover narratives of everyday life and identify opportunities and spaces for co-existence and new practices of integration and inhabitation. As part of a long term partnership with LDA (Local Democracy Agency in Zavidovici), and embedded onto DPU action research, the workshop is one kind of engagement where participants are faced with a multiplicity of intersubjective dilemmas, pitfalls and anachronisms, that call into question not only who we are and how we operate as urban practitioners, but also where we stand as human beings.
The 10th volume of the BUDDlab is available to download here: