Design, Politics, and Infrastructures of Immobility
As the world locks down on migration in the midst of a global pandemic, we feel an urgent need to communicate the ways design, politics, and mobility intersect. This pandemic illuminates many long-standing social inequalities, including vast differences in exposure, care, and differential abilities to move out of harm’s way, or be forced into it. These inequalities are sharply visible at borders, in refugee camps, and detention centers. These sites constitute infrastructures of immobility, which are structures built to confine movement for the purposes of control. The oppressive and unequal effects of these infrastructures on immigrants, poor people, and people of color demand that we politicize design. We are increasingly concerned that humanitarian, technocentric, and reformist approaches fall short of designers’ full capacities to challenge the injustices rendered through these infrastructures.
The context of the pandemic brings new awareness to immobility. While many of us find ourselves stuck at home, others are barred from seeking a new one. Migrants seeking refugee status in the United States have abruptly found the border sealed, forcing many more to join the increasingly large refugee camps on the Southern border. This ongoing crisis has been fueled by the current administration’s Remain in Mexico Policy, leading thousands of asylum seekers to be sent back to Mexico. The recent border closures have created even more hazardous and precarious circumstances, elevating the risk of mass COVID-19 outbreaks in the refugee camps. In crowded immigrant detentions centers, advocates also fear the potential for a devastating outbreak of illness.
In the glaring spotlight that COVID-19 shines on these inequalities, we write this essay with the conviction that designers can play a stronger role in challenging discriminatory practices. We explore how design can be politicized and depoliticized by examining how designers have engaged with refugee camps, the border wall, and detention facilities. We urge designers to examine how they may contest and re-politicize their engagement with these sites of institutionalized immobility, violence, and injustice.
In the summer of 2019, when large congregations were still a taken-for-granted aspect of life, a group of academics, designers, and humanitarian professionals gathered together for the Design for Humanity Conference. The goal of the conference was to unite designers and humanitarian workers in addressing refugee crises around the world. In response to the over 70 million people experiencing forced displacement (largely from war-afflicted and formerly colonized countries), the conference presented an opportunity to expand designers’ roles in addressing humanitarian needs.
“we write this essay with the conviction that designers can play a stronger role in challenging discriminatory practices”
We found, however, that the majority of ideas at the conference centered on small-scale, reformist approaches to refugee crises, such as how to create more habitable, “dignified” refugee camps. Architects discussed how to construct shelters that could be easily shipped around the world and modified if “temporary” shelters became long-term habitations. Others focused on how to improve the aesthetics of shelter construction, such as adding color to the traditionally white refugee tents, or planting trees within camps to provide a connection to nature (figure 1).
Figure 1. Refugee family standing beside shelter at Azraq camp, northern Jordan. Photography by U.K. Department for International Development’s photostream, courtesy Flickr under Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0.
An emphasis on shelter improvements produces a depoliticized approach to design that obscures concerns about global political economic forces generating precarity and displacement, creating a technocentric framework for the kinds of problems and solutions that designers envision. This technical approach sidelines questions about how displacement and conflict are created, and uncritically positions designers and humanitarians as justified in defining and taking humanitarian actions.
This depoliticized approach may not be surprising, as humanitarian organizations have often embraced a politically neutral position that enable them to work without becoming caught up in partisanship in a conflict zone. Organizations such as Doctors without Borders explicitly embrace the humanitarian principles of being “independent, impartial, and neutral” in order to work freely in any area where there is humanitarian need (table 1).
Table 1. Humanitarian Principles adapted from the UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Despite our utmost respect for Doctors without Borders, we see a difference between the politics of aligning oneself with a particular country or group, and the politics of attention to power, and the ways in which differences in power allow one to be “without borders” in a world where so many are detained and caged for attempting to cross them. For designers engaging in humanitarian work, de-politization can uphold, rather than challenge, the status quo. While better-designed shelters may indeed create benefits, we wonder, why not urge designers to contest the conditions producing displacement and demand that everyone have a safe and stable home instead?
While ideas at the Design for Humanity Conference focused on depoliticized, reformist approaches to humanitarian issues, designers engaging with the border wall represent alternative forms political (dis)engagement. Let’s consider the case of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The United States government has long engaged in policy that makes migration more dangerous and deadly. The border policy of “prevention through deterrence,” enacted in the 1990s, aimed to reduce migration by militarizing border crossings and forcing migrants into increasingly dangerous routes. People dying while attempting to cross the border is not an aberration of U.S. policy, but rather, “the deaths of unauthorized migrants have been a predictable and inhumane outcome of border security policies.” The Remain in Mexico policy and further militarization of the border wall are more recent manifestations of an ongoing structure of state-sanctioned violence.
Some designers have sought to engage with this border policy through a technocentric approach, considering how “best” to build a wall, including attention to aesthetics, cost, and function. These approaches are similar to those advocating for better shelters, confining design professionals to the role of condoning or ameliorating the effects of oppressive structures, rather than challenging them (figure 2).
Figure 2. Border patrol and prototypes for border wall construction, near Otay Mesa Port of Entry. Photograph by Mani Albrecht, 21 October 2017. U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Other designers have engaged more imaginatively with the border wall, envisioning utopic conceptions of the border. For example, Rael-San Fratello and No To Scale have produced border concepts that illustrate the interconnectedness of life on both sides of the border, with the border see-saw and a giant, 1,954 mile long dining table. In contrast to the technocentric depoliticization that focuses on design efficiency and reinforces destructive politics-as-usual, these utopic border designs reimagine cross-border relations. In offering a vision of conviviality and playfulness, these designs abstract the uneven power relations and oppression that shape border conditions.
Sekulić, Hunchuck, and Lambert criticize these utopic border prototypes as forms of romanticized spectacle, resulting in staged photo shoots that obscure the violence of the border. In contrast to these visions, they advocate for border bulldozers to destroy the wall. In so doing, they advocate for a politics of refusal. Yet, they do not offer a clear future vision of what designers can do beyond engaging in destruction of the status quo. We are left wondering, after the bulldozers, what next?
Contributing to the discussions on design and activism, architects Dana McKinney and Keefer Dunn have debated whether to engage with migrant detention centers through a politics of reform or refusal. McKinney advocates for engagement with detention centers, focusing on how to reform detention procedures, such as designing temporary urban housing for migrants. In contrast, Dunn advocates refusal, calling for a boycott of architects’ engagement with detention facilities (figure 3).
Figure 3. Detention facility at McAllen, Texas, 17 June 2018. Photograph provided by Custom and Border Protection. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The work of Deanna Van Buren provides an alternative way for designers to engage with infrastructures of migration and detention. Working to address the crisis of mass incarceration, Van Buren does not endeavor to design “better” prisons through reformist measures, nor does she engage solely in a politics of refusal. Rather, she advocates for an abolitionist approach, designing in terms of restorative justice. She designs peace centers, affordable housing, and spaces for employment training in order to provide alternatives to the violence of incarceration. Her approach involves a pragmatic political engagement, identifying the systemic oppression of the criminal justice system, and endeavoring to create achievable alternatives to incarceration.
“Infrastructures of immobility, such as borders, camps, and detention centers, are sites through which the unequal effects of capitalism, militarism, and racism are realized and magnified.”
A key aspect of Van Buren’s restorative justice work is letting people who are most affected by the policies of detention be the ones who guide her work and determine how to restore the harms that have been caused. This approach entails a collaborative approach to activism, where designers forge partnership with communities threatened by harm, and work together to determine how to respond. In conditions of structural violence, it is critical that people who have intimate knowledge and experience of oppression can guide the decisions that affect their lives.
Infrastructures of immobility, such as borders, camps, and detention centers, are sites through which the unequal effects of capitalism, militarism, and racism are realized and magnified. The burden of these oppressive infrastructures falls disproportionately on immigrants, poor people, and people of color. Depoliticized humanitarian, technical, and reformist measures risk perpetuating rather than transforming the conditions creating oppression. We therefore call on designers to repoliticize their engagement with these infrastructures by bringing attention to power, social context, and history and by developing collaborative practices and visions of justice. Challenging these infrastructures through a politics of refusal is one way that designers can engage politically. Restorative engagement that not only challenges the current system, but seeks to build a new one, is another. For architects in particular, now can be a time to refuse that social distancing become political distancing.
