Refugee Transition Network: City as commons and transition to sustainable refugee futures

Transition Design is an emerging framework that proposes collaborative design-led practices as a vehicle to create new narratives and approaches needed to address complex (wicked) problems and transitions towards more sustainable futures. It has been developed and used with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems (TEK) found in indigenous and local communities to re-design visions of their own development and systemic change.

There is little evidence of its application in the context of displaced populations. Our interest is to explore how this framework can be used to create new, much needed, narratives about urban refugee management, to transform the narratives of assimilation; a shift from the focus of "what refugees lack" and towards "what refugees bring".

War, political-economical conflicts, and environmental disasters are bringing into the present and near futures unprecedented, forced, displaced population crises. Refugees, asylum seekers, forced migrants and stateless populations are subjects of foreign policies, regarded as victims of external conflicts, vulnerable, passive agents, when on the contrary, these populations are becoming at home within the host country struggles.

Their knowledge, affections, political agencies and self-supported activities, have huge potential to inform systemic-level change that can aid local and global solutions, responsive to societal and environmental issues.

The notion of border becomes key here, not just as a geographical fact, but as socially produced and politically productive; not just marking territory but also imaginaries, affections, and identities. Borders maintain a sense of us and them, our world and theirs. Thus, the refugee crisis does not only refer to the tragedy of lives uprooted from their own places, but also to the destabilisation of the host country's sense of self.

Understanding territories not just as a property, state, or resource, but as a site of affective natural-social encounters, defines 'the commons', as a space for re-visioning subjective relations and imaginaries of self and others. 'Commoning' extends placemaking, and is concerned with affective encounters between humans and non-humans, nurturing grounds for fostering what Donna Haraway terms 'response-ability' - the ability to respond ethically to the demands of others with whom we share worlds. We find examples of 'common' theorists and practitioners working in spheres such as knowledge commons, open-source software, urban gardens, and the reclamation of cities. Our interest is to understand and support the refugee sites as 'commons'.

The network will explore how Transition Design brings about a much needed shift in which communities are not just in harmony with the environment but also with all of its members, within and across borders. Traditional design approaches that were characterised by linear processes, and whose objective was the realisation of predictable and profitable solutions, have a history not just of failing but actually exacerbating systemic and wicked problems.

The transition to sustainable refugee futures calls for new ways of designing that are based upon new narratives and deep paradigm transformation.