Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy

FROM THE PUBLISHER

To dwell in these globalizing times requires us to negotiate increasingly palpable flows - of capital, ideas, images, goods, technology and people. Such flows seem to pressurize, breach and sometimes even disaggregrate the places we always imagined to be distinctive and stable. This book is focused on the interaction of two elements within this contemporary situation. The first is the idea of a place we imagine to be distinctive and stable. This idea is explored through architecture, the institution that in the West has claimed the responsibility for imagining and producing places along these lines. The second element is a particular kind of global flow, namely the human flows of immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other migrant groups. This book carefully inspects the intersections between architectures of place and flows of migrancy. It does so without seeking to defend the idea of place, nor lament its disaggregation. Rather this book is an exploration of the often complex and unorthodox modes of dwelling that are emerging precisely from within the ruins of the idea of place.

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