Table of contents for N.108 in Topos

The African gazelle is known for its elegant movements and jumps. Its habitat is the open savannah. This makes the sight of that gazelle frozen like a statute on the last patch of grass all the more strange. Surrounded by bright lights, corrugated iron huts and people. Instead of making its characteristic bounce forward by lifting all four legs off the ground at the same time, the gazelle remains rooted in this unnatural danger zone. This is because the situation as depicted in the picture did not really happen. This is even though the displacement of animals from out of their natural habitat is very real. And, the primary driver of this displacement is mankind. In his photo series “This Empty World”, photographer Nick Brandt highlights precisely the displacement of…

When Typhoon Haiyan (local name: Yolanda) made landfall along Philippine shores on 8 November 2013, it caught everyone by surprise. It was a surprise not because this kind of extreme weather event cannot happen in the Philippines; in fact the Philippines has been ranked by the 2017 World Risk Index as the third riskiest country in terms of natural hazards. But Typhoon Haiyan was no ordinary typhoon. It was one of the biggest and strongest typhoons to have ever been recorded, having sustained winds of 315 km/hour. It made six landfalls across four regions in the Philippines and amassed a 5.9-metre storm surge that hit the municipalities of Tacloban, Palo, and Tanauan, and parts of Eastern Samar. While people were warned that a storm surge was brewing, the locals did…

topos: In what sense is housing one of the most urgent global issues nowadays? LEILANI FARHA: The way I feel the urgency is that everywhere I go housing and its affordability or one’s ability to access decent housing are a huge problem. Whether I’m sitting in a café in New York and speak with a person serving there or whether I’m at a market somewhere in Africa: when I start talking about housing, for most ordinary people it is a stress. It’s not just in my line of work. Ask your Uber driver, ask the person working in a hotel, ask the waiter in a restaurant, ask a man on the street somewhere in Africa running a small business… It’s the nature of housing that makes it such an important…

Involuntary relocations by way of evictions, rent increases, demolitions, foreclosures, urban development projects, climate change, and conflicts are a growing trend worldwide. When it comes to the African Continent, displacement seems to be the order of the day. According to a report of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) released May 2019, nearly 7.4 million people faced displacement due to conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2018, at the same time that another 2.6 million experienced it due to drought, floods, storms, and other disasters. The continent’s urban population has increased from 27 percent of the total population in 1950 to 40 percent in 2015; this figure is projected to reach 60 percent by 2050. Many who migrate find themselves without a proper place to live or access to basic social…

In the late 1990s it was a widely held view that the function of cities at the political level was at most a nostalgic one. This was explained with the fact that cities in a nation-state did not represent independent political units and thus could not be counted as significant players responsible for migration and integration policies (which instead were dealt with at the national level and “occurred” globally). Nowadays the nearly opposite view has become dominant. European cities have increased their scope of action, at the regional, national and even supranational, i.e. the EU level, by negotiating local solutions concerning migration and integration. On the one hand cities are reaching out to newcomers (“flow population”), on the other hand they are compelled to react, internally, to processes of displacement…

Façades are the calling card of any sophisticated architecture. Special lighting tools are needed in order to make their impact within the context of a harmonious landscape architecture visible in the dark as well. Always tailored to the project at hand, whether the lighting is intended to be subtle or powerful, in-ground floor LED luminaires and the surface-mounted floor luminaires from Bega enable a wide range of luminous intensity distributions and specific-crafted luminance. The design of the in-ground LED floodlights, for example, makes it possible to illuminate a vertical surface up to a height of about 8 metres completely in soft light. The lower limit of the light intensity distribution is linear, without the otherwise common light cones. The luminaires are mounted in a stainless steel housing on a foundation…

Nauru, an island state in the Pacific Ocean with an area of 21 km² and 11,000 inhabitants, is officially the smallest republic in the world. Unofficially, however, a Spanish artist occasionally subverts the island state's record by founding republics in random landscapes. They are never larger than 100 m², their existence lasts no longer than 24 hours and their only inhabitant is the artist himself. The most important criterion for the existence of each respective "Minimal Republic" is the border artist Rubén Martín de Lucas artificially creates, which he does with geometric perfection. Sometimes he marks out a triangle on a piece of wasteland, sometimes he mows a square in a field of grain, and he's even created a republic with a circle of stones at a beach on Spain's…

topos: Environmental disasters, climate change, armed conflicts or development: What are the most important drivers of displacement? ANTHONY OLIVER-SMITH: Well, you know, if you look at it over time, it depends on how deep you want to go into history. It varies from year to year. If you look at Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) data over the past years, it fluctuates. Armed conflicts flare up and generate huge numbers of refugees, and then you get environmental disasters that lead to huge amounts of displaced people. It’s a process. I think that most migrations are a mix of push-pull. And I make a distinction between displacement and migration. Displacement is a process of uprooting, however it happened. When you talk about drivers, the question of the acuteness of the drivers…

Disasters, especially those triggered by floods, can necessitate the evacuation and displacement of a community. The aftermath sees a common desire to return home as soon as possible, despite destruction, casualties, or trauma. For a community at risk of recurring disasters, rebuilding and reconstruction on site must support the improvement of existing conditions. Strategies such as “building back better” therefore aim to reduce environmental risks by adapting to them. In some cases, however, such risks can only be avoided by relocating and resettling someplace else, presumably safe. This type of resettlement is rare, but one such example is Grantham, a project planned and developed after a catastrophic flood that impacted a rural community in the Australian state of Queensland in 2011. The state government initiated an ambitious plan to create…

“The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.”FRITJOF CAPRA The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (Doubleday, 1996) Over the past eight years, the war in Syria has caused millions of Syrians to flee their country, with the vast majority of refugees finding shelter in three neighbouring countries, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. In Jordan, around 663,000 Syrian refugees are officially registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while unofficial counts estimate their numbers to be above one million. Many of the displaced people have found temporary homes in refugee camps, however the majority, more than 80 percent, live in towns and villages throughout Jordan. The Syrian civil war is not the first…

In our globalized world, goods are transported from one continent to another with unprecedented frequency, and people travel great distances within a few hours. These transportation routes do not only carry wares and luggage, however, but often stowaways. Tiny seeds can stick to all kinds of materials, and many plants have evolved structures such as spines or hairs to enhance this capability. Arriving in a new area, these seeds can establish and grow, building a population and causing the species to spread. Sometimes, populations even thrive and grow dense, outcompeting native plants. In such cases, these plants are called “invasive”. It is not only stowaways who become invasive. In fact, most invasive plant species were intentionally introduced as garden plants, bee plants, for landscaping, or for forestry. The more frequently…

With its 14 hectares (35 acres), Parc André Citroën was was one of the largest new parks in Paris at the time of its opening in 1992. Its name is derived from the area upon which it is built: The Citroën automobile factory on the banks of the River Seine in the 15th arrondissement, built in 1915 and abandoned in the 1970s. In the 1985 competition for the design of the site, the jury was unable to decide on one design alone. Instead, it awarded two first prizes together with a proposal that the architects Patrick Berger, Jean-Paul Viguier and Jean-Francois Vidry tackle the project together with landscape architects Gilles Clément and Alain Provost. As a team, they designed an elaborate, post-modern park in the tradition of French garden architecture,…

In Central Italy there were three major earthquakes in rapid succession in 2016, on the 24, 26 and 30 August, impacting the regions of Abruzzo, Lazio, Marche and Umbria. There was also another significant quake on the 18 January 2017. The affected area, called the ‘Earthquake Crater’, included 140 municipalities that were home to 600,000 persons. The greatest impact was in areas located in the Apennine Mountains. Here the landscape is characterised by woodland and pastures, and a constellation of small villages which have, for the most part, medieval origins. The area features a dense network of connections constructed over decades that conjoins the various villages, favouring agriculture as well as tourism, which are the main sources of income. The Apennine landscape of Umbria and Marche is an area of…

Los Angeles’ skid row has long been a site and symbol of inequality. As homelessness has risen in the L.A. region, conditions in skid row have gotten worse. Tents line sidewalks. The Governor speaks of the return of “medieval” diseases. Sanitation crews in hazmat suits spray streets with disinfectant, yet seem helpless to counter heaps of trash and illegal dumping. As homelessness has spread to other neighbourhoods beyond Downtown, skid row has paradoxically grown in significance as a warning sign. Journalist Steve Lopez, who has written empathetically about skid row residents for decades, now describes it as a symbol of “collapse.” Advocates and even the United Nations have blamed conditions in skid row on the city, county, state and federal governments’ failure to provide housing and services for vulnerable residents.…

The Olympic Games transform urban landscapes. That’s the point of the event. It’s why politicians clamour to host these sports mega-events, even in the face of overwhelming evidence sceptical of the benefits they offer to host cities. As Vancouver-based activist Chris Shaw succinctly puts it: “The Olympics aren’t about sport. They’re about real estate”. This isn’t a surprise. Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone explicitly stated that he “didn’t bid for the Olympics because [he] wanted three weeks of sport. [He] bid for the Olympics because it’s the only way to get the billions of pounds out of the Government to develop the East End.” Along with the Olympic Games comes a range of shiny legacy projects to justify public expenditure, from Vancouver’s Canada Line light rail to Rio’s Metro…

‘We live here, we work here and still we are not at peace in this place.’A REFUGEE IN KUALA LUMPUR How do we dwell in a place? For most of us, dwelling presents a form of living beyond mere or bare life, one in which we are allowed to and encouraged to form spaces into our places: name them, build on them, inhabit them and shape their pasts, presents and futures. Whether we rent or own a home, we have agency in making it our own; we move in our furniture, we paint the walls and hang up our pictures. Even beyond our own four walls, we plant trees in the garden, walk to the playground, cycle through the parks and go for a hike in the forest – in…

I write these words as Europe suffers through the hottest week on record. Extreme temperatures are sweeping across the continent from Poland to Spain, including a historic peak of 45.9 C in France. The heatwave continues 2018 summer’s trend of hot weather and record-breaking temperatures in Northern Europe – spurring fires that scorched thousands of hectares in Sweden, drought causing cattle to perish in Switzerland, halting Hanover’s airport operations due to cracks in the tarmac, and more. But now last year’s headlines are fading memories and seem a mere prelude for today. Climate change is a hot topic. People – mostly the young people – are mobilizing throughout the world, stoked by fierce debates between apocalypticists and denialists. While focus is placed on the disastrous environmental effects of global warming…