Design for Fragility maps thirteen built projects across eleven countries where architects confronted displacement, civil conflict, poverty, and disaster — translating the principles of humanitarian architecture into constructed spatial reality.
About This Book
With nearly 100 million people displaced globally by conflict, disaster, and systemic poverty, the gap between humanitarian need and architectural capacity has never been more acute. Design for Fragility, edited by Esther Charlesworth and John Fien, addresses this directly through thirteen built projects that span refugee housing, children's facilities, health infrastructure, and First Nations communities across countries including Uganda, Iran, Bangladesh, Fiji, Pakistan, and Australia. Rather than surveying the field abstractly, the book interrogates each project on multiple levels: the conditions of fragility that shaped the brief, the typological response chosen, the values and methods of the design team, and the honest assessment of what succeeded and what did not. For practitioners and educators working within or moving toward humanitarian architecture and post-disaster reconstruction, this is an essential and self-critical reference.
Key Features
- 232 pages of project documentation, critical analysis, and over 150 illustrations spanning built humanitarian architecture across 11 countries
- Edited by Esther Charlesworth and John Fien
- 13 case studies including refugee housing in Uganda, an orphanage for teenage girls in Iran, and a residential centre in Northern Australia for people with acquired brain injury
- Published by Routledge, 2014
What You'll Discover
- How the concept of “spatial agency” operates in practice across diverse conditions of fragility — from post-conflict settlement to post-colonial poverty
- The role of consultation with contested and vulnerable project stakeholders, and the ethical complexity it introduces for design teams
- Honest accounts from architects, project managers, occupants, and donors on what each project achieved and where it fell short
- How the humanitarian architecture movement has expanded globally through organisations including MASS Design Group and Architecture Sans Frontières (ASF) International
About the Author
Esther Charlesworth is a leading figure in the field of humanitarian architecture, and this volume follows her earlier Routledge publication Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working After Disasters (2014), which examined spatial agency in post-disaster shelter and settlement design. John Fien co-edits the volume, bringing expertise in education and sustainable development to the project. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 232
- Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780367555375
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 2014
Perfect For: Architects, landscape architects, and urban planners working in or transitioning to humanitarian and post-disaster contexts; design educators developing curricula around social agency; development aid professionals seeking to understand the spatial dimensions of reconstruction; and students engaging critically with architecture’s role in fragile and displaced communities.