Deconstrucing "Displacement", Reconstructing Housing

01.05.2026 – 15.06.2026

Displacement, whether from political, environmental or economic causes, is a growing global crisis. Research shows that living as a displaced person means ongoing exposure to threat, risk, precarity, discrimination, loss of livelihood and loss of identity, all of which converge into a fundamental sense of “losing home” as described in the 2023 paper by Bunn, Samuels & Higson-Smith “Ambiguous loss of home: Syrian refugees and the process of losing and remaking home” (Wellbeing, Space and Society, 4, p.4).

Losing home thus requires remaking home, a process of safeguarding key elements of displaced persons’ prior lives, including their identities, family and community ties, local traditions, and cultural practices. Housing and shelter play a critical part of this remaking process.

Identifying robust housing solutions presupposes that housing problems are systematically defined, but often problems and solutions are tightly bound to the limiting discourses of highly specialised disciplines like public health, architecture, or law. Narrowly-defined problems and inadequate solutions result.

This research group reimagines housing for displaced persons by convening 10 leading scholars from different disciplines and from five countries: Germany, Australia, USA, South Africa and the Philippines. Moving beyond fragmented approaches, the project creates a space for deep transdisciplinary collaboration. Through an intensive, dialogic workshop process, the group will generate a bold new conceptual framework capable of reshaping how displacement, housing, and human settlement are understood. The outcome will be a transformative research agenda that challenges existing paradigms and opens new pathways for policy, practice, and global collaboration.