RECORD invites designers to redefine the refugee experience. Deborah Gans and DenIse Hoffman Brandt Dadaab Urban Plan “The refugee camps of today are the cities of tomorrow,” says New York–based architect Deborah Gans, who, with landscape architect Denise Hoffman Brandt, proposes reconfiguring Dadaab, Kenya, to better accommodate its three refugee settlements. Dadaab proves Gans’s point. The region around this arid town near the Somalia border, which ballooned to 200,000 people during Ethiopian military actions in Somalia in 2006, has housed the Dagahaley, Hagadera, and Ifo camps for more than 30 years. More recently, the trio of camps counted 135,000 inhabitants,

RECORD invites designers to redefine the refugee experience. PHOOEY Architects Flemington Youth Center In October 2007, Australia’s then minister of immigration, Kevin Andrews, admitted that the government had altered its refugee policy in response to the impression that Africans, and particularly Sudanese asylum-seekers, had trouble assimilating with the culture. In the wake of the murder of Sudanese refugee Liep Gony, Andrews said, “I have been concerned that some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope, and therefore it makes sense to put the extra money into slow[ing]

RECORD invites designers to redefine the refugee experience. Despite the best efforts of global capital and the Internet to erase boundaries between countries, citizenship—and its attendant rights—still is defined by geography. The world’s 10 million refugees, then, occupy intermediate places where everything from basic services to a sense of dignity is defined by design. Since these schemes rarely transcend the minimal requisites of survival, we asked three architects to imagine enlightened alternatives to the tent cities and training centers that tend to dot the refugee landscape today, either in the architects’ own neighborhoods or abroad. Each of these participants has

Architects have embraced social responsibility longer than the media has acknowledged. In fact, an optimistic view of design’s ability to improve the world has defined great movements in the profession’s history. But only recently has activity in this field and attention from the press reached critical mass. This issue of record considers the flourishing of design with conscience—from isolated instances in the academy to an increasing trend in practice. Image courtesy Urban-Think Tank Urban-Think Tank is working on two vertical gyms for Venezuela’s barrios. Read a profile of the firm in our Humanitarian Design section. Why the explosion? “What may

Guest editor of RECORD's October 2008 issue, David Sokol, speaks with San Diego architect Teddy Cruz about form, politics, and 'repositioning practice.' DS: How does inserting architecture at these margins manifest itself architecturally, or do you become a politician? TC: That fear of politics and social engineering has generated debate. I think ultimately that’s counter-productive. I feel that the only terrain that can be fertile for experimental architecture needs to be a terrain that is composed of the right sociopolitical and economic conditions. Image courtesy Estudio Teddy Cruz Teddy Cruz with Ana Aleman, Border Postcard: The Tijuana Workshop, 2000. I

Guest editor of RECORD's October 2008 issue, David Sokol, speaks with San Diego architect Teddy Cruz about form, politics, and 'repositioning practice.' David Sokol: In this October’s “The Architect’s Hand” column, RECORD published two of your works. Border Postcard was realized in 2000. This mosaic of photographic fragments collected between Tijuana and San Diego represents how the urban infrastructure of San Diego is recycled into the fabric of Tijuana. A more recent artwork installed at this year’s Venice Biennale, Radicalizing the Local: 60 Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict, is a photographic cross-section of the border between these two cities highlighting

Images courtesy Urban Lab “Eco-boulevards” inserted into Chicago’s street system would clean wastewater. In 2007, the nine-year-old architecture studio UrbanLab won The History Channel’s City of the Future ideas competition with its entry, Growing Water. Most notably, the submission envisioned how Chicago could insert “eco-boulevards” into the street system that would clean wastewater and storm water by bioremediation. The concept has gained traction among decision makers in the city’s transportation and environmental departments, as well as the mayor’s office, according to Martin Felsen, AIA, UrbanLab coprincipal with Sarah Dunn. But for a young office juggling a gamut of residential and

In May, This Way was switched on, illuminating the pedestrian entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood.