Launch of Displacements: Architecture and Refugee by Andrew Herscher

Join us at e-flux on Monday, May 8, at 7pm for the launch of Displacements: Architecture and Refugee by Andrew Herscher published by Sternberg Press. The event will feature a panel discussion with Andrew Herscher, Sandi Hilal, Reinhold Martin, Alessandro Petti, moderated by e-flux Architecture editor Nikolaus Hirsch.

In architectural history, just as in global politics, refugees have tended to exist as mere human surplus; histories of architecture, then, have usually reproduced the nation-state’s exclusion of refugees as people out of place. Andrew Herscher’s Displacements: Architecture and Refugee, the ninth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series (edited by Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen), examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present. Posing the refugee as the preeminent collective political subject of our time, Displacements attempts to open up an architectural history of the refugee that could refract on the history of architecture and the history of the refugee alike.

Andrew Herscher
Displacements: Architecture and Refugee 
Critical Spatial Practice 9
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen | Featuring artwork by Omer Fast
Design by Zak Group
Sternberg Press, May 2017
English, 10.5 x 15 cm, 156 pages, 26 b/w and 5 color ill., softcover with dust jacket

Andrew Herscher is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Department of Art History. His publications include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012), and, coedited with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Spatial Violence (Routledge, 2016).

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.