Team Leader : 

• Dr. Maria Luján Escalante (PI) from the University of Arts London

Team Member : 

• Dr. Akino Tahir

Background

Asylum seekers and refugees, hereinafter referred to as refugees, are forced to leave their country of origin to seek protection in either a transit or destination country. As of 2021, a total of 82.4 million people have been forcibly displaced, of which 30.5 million people are categorized as asylum seekers and refugees (UNHCR, 2021b). So-called “developing” countries hold around 86% of refugees and two-thirds of them are residing in urban settings (Kirbyshire et al., 2017). Refugees are subjected to foreign policies, and regarded as victims of external conflicts, and vulnerable, passive agents, while on the contrary, refugee populations are becoming at home within the host country. The interest is to assemble a design-led transdisciplinary network that applies Transition Design as a methodology to transform existing narratives of refugees focusing on what they bring rather than what they lack.
Transition Design (TD) as a theoretical framework of the project integrates an emerging set of ideas related to other ways of knowing, and the design of worlds in which many worlds fit, sustainable inclusive futures, and interdependent relations with the land. This growing strand of research has denounced the complicity of design with colonialism (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021), anthropocentrism (Forlano, 2016), and other forms of oppression. Pluriversal design (Noel, 2020), feminist designs (Bardzell, 2010), design justice (CostanzaChock, 2018), multispecies design (Westerlaken, 2020), designing for liberation (Jack & Tuli, 2021), and designs of the South (Gutiérrez Borrero, 2015) are some approaches that shift design research from denouncing to announcing new realities. This transition in design as a discipline, has been very little explored in the context of displaced populations in transit or aiming to find a new home country. The hypothesis of this proposal is that TD; its ideas, methods, and announcements of new realities, have a lot to contribute to both methods of micro-integrations of urban refugees and new understandings of the city as commons.

TD advocates for the re-conception and re-design of entire lifestyles, visions, and imaginaries, with the aim of making them more place-based, convivial, and participatory, and harmonizing them with the environment. Traditional design approaches (concerned with the design of products, services, experiences, etc.) whose objective was the realization of predictable and profitable solutions, have a history not just of failing but actually exacerbating systemic and complex problems – wicked problems.

The transition to sustainable refugee futures calls for new ways of designing that are based upon a deep paradigm transformation. TD works with the notion of ‘commons’ as generative spaces of participation and belonging which embodies what Donna Haraway (1997) describes as response-ability, or the ability to respond ethically to the demands of others with whom we share worlds. We find examples of ‘commons’ theorists and practitioners working in spheres such as knowledge commons, open-source software, urban gardens, and the reclamation of cities. Our interest is to understand the refugee-hosting city as the ‘commons’ using TD, and to engage and consult with refugees, practitioners working in refugee management organizations, and local government, to map real needs and test assumptions, to identify actionable information and to define the strategy of a future research and development project.

Aims and Objectives

The project proposes to build a design-led international network of stakeholders and transdisciplinary researchers, to explore the use of Transition Design and the idea of the city as a’commons’ as the basis of a future methodology to advance the work of urban refugee management. The overall aim is to co-design a follow-up research and development project proposal.

1. To create Refugee Transition Network (RTN) with relevant academic and non-academic partners, such as researchers, stakeholders, practitioners, observers, and refugee-led organizations. Through the network, we will reinforce relations, create a memorandum of understanding, and assemble a steering group with relevant partners for future research projects.
   
2. To gather cases of good practice and successful methods in the use of Transition Design and ‘the city as Commons’ in the context of urban refugee management to create a bilingual (English and Bahasa) teaching resource.
   
3. To gather initial insights from co-design workshops applying the TD framework with practitioners and communities of refugees in the UK and Indonesia.
   
4. To co-design, with stakeholders and researchers involved in the network, a research proposal to respond to funding opportunities and a future AHRC research project.

Project Location: Indonesia and the United Kingdom

Participants:

• ACH-Bristol,
• TERN-London,
• Southwark Council,
• DE: Lab Indonesia Refugee-led Organisations (RLO)

Related Link 

https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-communication/research-at-lcc/refugee-transition-network