Spatial Design Strategies for Climate- and Conflict-Induced Migration

Climate change presents an urgent global challenge with far-reaching implications for human societies and all other species inhabiting the planet. Over the next few decades, extreme climate zones and uninhabitable areas are projected to expand, driven by factors such as water stress, food insecurity, extreme heat, sea level rise, and weather-related disasters such as storms and wildfires. These challenges are already driving instability and increasing displacement, forcing individuals and communities to leave behind the spaces and cultures they have inhabited for generations.

As of 2024, an estimated 120 million people are displaced (UNHCR), with projections suggesting this number may rise significantly, disproportionally impacting individuals and communities historically the least responsible for the climate crisis.

This project-based seminar will examine migration induced by climate and conflict, which often intersect, in one of the most volatile hotspots in the world, the Sahel. The Sahel region has been grappling with the root causes and the multidimensional consequences of climate change for a long time; colonization, extensive resource extraction, conflict, and militarization. In the region, new trends in migration are observed, and local, national, and international policies and protocols for humanitarian contingency planning are currently being developed in response.

In the Sahel, traditional lifestyles such as nomadic pastoralism and transhumance have thrived for millennia in extreme weather conditions, offering valuable lessons in adaptability and perseverance in times of crisis and resource scarcity. 

• What can we learn about the future of climate migration from these migration 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, habitat typologies?
• How can we forge 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?

In the seminar, the class will engage with diverse stakeholders and viewpoints from theory and practice. We will have conversations with representatives of United Nations agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which possess real-time data and field experience. Drawing on their data sets and engaging in dialogue with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community representatives, we will develop a case study focused on climate migration in the Sahel, with particular attention to the situation in Mauritania, where local and international organizations are working together to support the country’s open-door policy and its efforts to host refugees from the region (and keep them from reaching Europe).

Sessions will include meetings with diverse stakeholders, interaction with UN agencies, non-governmental organizations and representative of local communities, and in-class workshops for project development that include spatial analyses of migration trends and scenario exercises. To attend the class, students are required to have knowledge of spatial design (architecture, urban and landscape architecture) along with basic mapping skills.