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Humanitarianism
Editors Jonathan Luke Austin, Nick Axel, Javier Fernández Contreras, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anna Leander
Contributors Andrew Herscher, Daniel Bertrand Monk , Nora Doukkali, Anna Leander, Silke Oldenburg, Jacob Burns, Irit Katz, Jonathan Luke Austin, Maevia Griffiths, Rachel Howell, and more…

The pressures placed on humanitarianism today are simultaneously simple and complex. It is urgent to critique what has become of the humanitarian-industrial complex. It is also urgent to convert that critique into a different—radical, yet pragmatic—future. The roots of this future exist far outside any metropole, and require gentle cultivation to germinate their political vitality and dreams of a collective “rise of humanity.”  But above all, we must avoid a retreat to the pathologies of the imperial forgetting machine (l’oublioir) that is already seeking to restore life to today’s dying humanitarian order.  If humanitarianism’s failures are by design, then a different future for humanitarianism must also be by design. 

Humanitarianism is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Future of Humanitarian Design, a research project of the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne, funded by FNS Sinergia.

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20 essays
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Informal Settlements and the Limits of Humanitarian Design
Jaime Hernández-Garcia and Silke Oldenburg
Beneath the benevolent desire to “improve” lives rests the neocolonial assumption that expertise is an external commodity and that the inhabitants of informal settlements lack the rationality to manage their own environment.
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Mycelial Memory: Cultivating a Forest of Hope Amid Landscapes of Enforced Disappearance
Aline Wani, Maevia Griffiths, and Sergio Beltrán-García
In February 2024, Rosa finished a conversation with La Guardiana del Bosque, a WhatsApp chatbot. Rosa, as well as thousands of searching families (colectivos de buscadoras) across Mexico, is looking for her disappeared tesoro (“treasure”—the name used for a disappeared loved one) and trying to build memory in a context of extreme impunity.
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Life Beyond Emergency: Ecologies and Inhabitations of Migration
Alma Avgar Shohamy, Susana Crane Ruge, Sayuri Govender, Elia Min, Zoë Perlis, Shivani Shedde, Maya Sheppard, Sabrina Theresa Stark, Erin Wen, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Life Beyond Emergency is a pedagogy predicated upon migrant life.
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Humanitarian Crises and the Spatial Politics of Warfare Video Games
Aida Navarro Redón and Javier Fernández Contreras
Video games and humanitarian crises—especially those caused by armed confrontations—have been intertwined since the very origins of digital computing.
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Modalities of the Provisional: Rearticulating the Global Shelter Imaginary in Brazil
Vitória M. Kavanami and Victória M. S. Santos
Between April and May 2024, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul faced the most significant climate disaster in its history, marking one of the most severe hydrological events ever recorded in the country.
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Playful Preparedness: Prefigurative Design in Anticipation of Disasters
Chika Watanabe
In the blistering Tokyo summer of 2017, a theater company organized an interactive performance for children and their families to learn about disaster preparedness.
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The Ambivalent Plasticity of Plastics
Silke Oldenburg, Anna Leander, and Nora Doukkali
In Colombia’s humanitarian borderlands, plastic is more than a matter of convenience: it shapes shelters, mediates medical care, and marks paths through minefields.
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Technosocial Reproduction and Humanitarian Reason
Margie Cheesman and Claudia Aradau
A white van rolled through the gates of a refugee camp in mainland Greece, its driver unloading a stack of pre-packaged lunches.
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Nomadic Cultures Amidst Forced Displacement
Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST)
In an era defined by escalating climate crises and ongoing conflicts, human displacement has become a pervasive and urgent global issue.
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Architecture, Humanitarianism, and Social Media
Javier Fernández Contreras and Damien Greder
Social media is transforming the public’s relationship with humanitarianism in two opposing but complementary ways.
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Animal Minds, Humanitarian Designs: Interventions with Nonhuman Others
Benjamin Meiches
If humanitarianism strives to produce a form of politics with an expanded moral circle, then animality is like a design flaw, the ever-displaced limit of this expansion.
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Paths to Scale
Rachel Howell and Grégoire Castella
The advent of the smartphone and increased access to the internet has brought about rapid changes in the humanitarian sector and raised expectations for increased efficiency of humanitarian operations and delivery of new digital services to people living in humanitarian settings.
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How to Stop Killing People
Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths
As an industry, humanitarianism is a similar series of quasi-scientific experiments in time travel. It imagines that the ethico-political righteousness of its basic principles can open up a utopian future that will redeem a failed world.
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Gaza, Stripped: Displacement, Destruction, and Necro-Humanitarianism
Irit Katz
Among the modes of violence inflicted by Israel on the Gaza Strip in the aggression that followed the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, three had specific spatial dimensions of humanitarian implications.
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Constructing the Risk Threshold
Jacob Burns
Humanitarian architecture always carries within itself an idea of risk. The spatial configuration of the buildings that humanitarianism is practiced within reflects a perception of the surrounding environment and the dangers that it might pose.
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Humanitarians on Hold: Cruel Optimism and Rhythmic Objects of Care
Nora Doukkali, Anna Leander, and Silke Oldenburg
Certain objects populate the majority of humanitarian settings. Tents, kits, jerrycans, or vouchers for food rations are humanitarian objects by design. But other objects, like a motorcycle resting under a porch, a drum in the corner of a room, or the emojis of a WhatsApp group, dwell unnoticed in humanitarian landscapes.
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#inhumanitarianism
Andrew Herscher and Daniel Bertrand Monk
The inhumane dimension of Trump’s proposal to provide “nice homes” to Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza was evident, but a similar inhumanity underlies the provision of shelter to refugees and other displaced people in the manifold contemporary contexts where the legal protection of those people is euphemized as physical shelter, and in that way left unrecognized.
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Editorial
The Future of Humanitarian Design and e-flux Architecture
Humanitarianism is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Future of Humanitarian Design, a research project of the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne, funded by FNS Sinergia.
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Category
Design, Human and Civil Rights
Subject
Architecture, Statelessness, Refugees, Crisis

Humanitarianism is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Future of Humanitarian Design, a research project of the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne, funded by FNS Sinergia. 

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