Urbanism in humanitarian settings

This small grant will build on a RIBA Research Trust funded project called (re)constructing the city which looked at the difficulties that humanitarians and urbanists have in trying to work together. The project proposes to bring an anthropological perspective to this research, through the critical analysis of workshop transcripts from mixed groups of humanitarians and urbanists struggling to work together.

The original research captured the problems that humanitarians and urbanists faced in working together to reconstruct urban areas after disaster, though an analysis of neighbourhood reconstruction projects in post-earthquake Haiti. These challenges were presented and reviewed at a final workshop with practitioners and were found to originate in fundamental conflicts in the guiding philosophies and different professional organisational structures of urbanists and humanitarians and in the ways that the two groups conceive, imagine and operate in urban space. 

The project proposes to further investigate the deep and complex anthropological/psychological issues at play through text and discourse analysis of dialogues that has taken place.

The final workshop will draw in a wider network of staff and graduate students interested in these ideas by consolidating our informal relationships and building on incidental conversations, seeking out and inviting colleagues from anthropological, psychological and ethical perspectives in addition to engineers and architects.