Andrew Herscher

Daniel Bertrand Monk

Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself.

Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief

The Global Shelter Imaginary

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency was founded in 2008 as an open-access platform for research on urban crisis, using Detroit as a focal point. Against the apprehension of Detroit as a problem that needs to be solved, the Agency has regarded Detroit as a site where new ways of imagining, inhabiting and constructing the contemporary city are being invented, tested and advanced.--P. 2.

Andrew Herscher

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