In a world where the ground itself is becoming provisional, what does it mean to dwell? As climate change intensifies, uninhabitable zones are expected to expand dramatically. Water stress, food insecurity, extreme heat, sea level rise, and disasters are driving displacement on an unprecedented scale. As of 2024, an estimated 123 million people are displaced, a number projected to rise further, falling hardest on those least responsible. Behind each figure is a lived world, a daily experience of leaving, moving, waiting, and remaking home. It is from inside that experience that this seminar begins.

This project-based seminar examines migration driven by climate and conflict, which often intersect, in one of the most volatile regions on Earth: the Sahel. Rather than treating displacement only as a problem to be measured, we ask what it is actually like, and how flux is endured and inhabited by the people who live it. Older ways of life such as nomadic pastoralism and transhumance have thrived here for millennia under extreme conditions. We approach these not as lessons in resilience but as sophisticated phenomenologies of impermanence, cultures that have never confused permanence with home.

As displacement accelerates, the roles of local and international actors are renegotiated in real time, and so are the protocols deciding where people may settle and what may be built. We ask how policy is experienced on the ground, and how design might serve open-ended, mobile settlement instead of fixed enclosure.

The course revolves around the following questions: What can we learn about the future of climate migration from these forced displacement trends and rich local cultures, and how can they intersect with international interventions? How can we use multi-temporal and multi-scalar spatial analysis and climate vulnerability projections to understand a future planet in a constant state of flux, one in which the constraints of national territories are perhaps transcended, while embracing a deeper cultural preservation of lifestyles, construction techniques, materiality, and habitat typologies? How can we forge regenerative relationships with broader ecological and environmental conditions defined by commons and collective resource management? What can these insights teach us about architecture and urban planning, and how can we use them to challenge our own discipline, pedagogy, and relationship with spatial production?

The class will engage stakeholders including UN agencies such as UNHCR, UNICEF, and UN Habitat, alongside local NGOs, community representatives, designers, and scientists, developing spatial design strategies grounded in a case study of climate migration in the Sahel.

Student projects will move across typologies, asking how a built form holds a lived world in flux: infrastructure (water, energy, mobility, routes); dwelling that is semi-nomadic, semi-ephemeral, and semi-permanent; and the civic and care typologies communities depend on, schools and health clinics chief among them.