Critical Spatial Practice #9: Displacements

In architectural history, just as in global politics, refugees have tended to exist as mere human surplus; histories of architecture, then, have usually reproduced the nation-state’s exclusion of refugees as people out of place. Andrew Herscher’s ‘Displacements: Architecture and Refugee’, the ninth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present. Posing the refugee as the preeminent collective political subject of our time, Displacements attempts to open up an architectural history of the refugee that could refract on the history of architecture and the history of the refugee alike.