ABSTRACT
When addressing housing issues posed by “south-to-north” migration, architectural thinking seems to settle for redesigning the minimal living unit. The reliance on small, repeatable modules betrays a certain bias toward conceiving of urban development as the accumulation of single-family cells. This holds true whether the migrant’s refuge is a high-design cabin or a low-technology shack. Yet crossing the history of population movements with the history of cities reveals that significant urban-scale architectural innovations occur when the housing question is carried beyond the paradigm of tents, cabins and containers. This paper consists of a critical reflection on two design studios at the Bordeaux School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (EnsapBx, France) that addressed current migration phenomena in order to contribute to thinking about urban dwelling in general, as well as about the role that architects might play and the expertise that they might employ in this context.
