Transitory Cities: Emergency architecture and the challenge of climate change

Abstract

Cities are increasingly affected by climate change. Many will be impacted by rising sea levels and face a substantial increase in risks associated with destructive natural disasters like tsunamis and floods. When population centres are hit by such disasters, ‘climate refugees’ are often forced to migrate for their survival. Nathanael Dorent argues that there is a need to rethink how cities are conceived to respond to rapid environmental changes and possible catastrophes. Today, displaced people are generally parked in refugee camps that are almost always situated outside of the city. This policy reflects a certain conception of politics and space. In opposition to this model, the concept of emergency architecture offers an unfolding, alternative transitory space intended to underscore connectivity and reconfiguring networks within the city. Erasing borders between what are too often conceived as closed communities of settled citizens and refugees, it could also be a way of supporting a flexible migratory life. This alternative idea for refugee camps is a conceptual framework for the development of new cities in the future. Such cities will be in continual flux, responding to ever-shifting forces. They will adapt to the environment as well as new forms of mobility within and between urban spaces. In opposition to the vertical or horizontal archaic static models of the cities of the kind we presently live in, future cities could thus offer sustainability and prevent crises through their flexible, plastic, transformable and adaptable models.