Student Work

Erdem Ergin (MDesS ’13) 
As a student in the Risk and Resilience concentration area, Erdem Ergin worked jointly with the World Bank to develop new hurricane shelter typologies for Haiti. He combined a background in system engineering with training in design studies to develop innovative applications for disaster risk management. “The program really gave me a critical spatial perspective. I used to think with numbers and charts. Now I also work in graphs and maps, and it allows me to do this work so much more effectively.”

Marianne Potvin (MDesS ’13)
Trained as an architect, Marianne Potvin spent several years between Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur working with humanitarian organizations. “When I was in the field, I noticed the humanitarian community wasn’t equipped to handle responses in urbanized conditions,” she explains. “They are usually more adapted to emer-gency camp settings, but in the city, those responses need to be considered differently—all the issues are heightened in what are usually fragile municipalities.” In Risk and Resilience, Potvin has set out to examine humanitarian urbanism, coupling her earlier fieldwork with current research to document how climate variability and political crises affect urbanization trends.