Refugee housing is a symptom of a greater complex challenge: how people inhabit a new location, maintain and establish relationships, and then plan for their future. Developing shelter for people who are displaced or have experienced trauma deserves more than cookie-cutter approaches or even putting solutions into a framework. It involves beginning a relationship to understand how we as humans deal with traumatic processes and find our resilient capacities. To start to understand how to design housing for refugees, we first need to understand refugees. That means deeply studying what the response to trauma looks like within a specific context. Until we understand the invisible aspects that shape our world, will we ever make sense of the visible ones. 

Alex Y. Miller, UO BArch 2009, is a team leader for Shelter and Settlements at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He oversees humanitarian construction of life-saving refugee settlement programming funded by United States government. After practice in private architecture firms, he has been working in the humanitarian field for more than a decade. He started with hands-on field supervision of construction and moved into programming and planning settlements and now he is strategically funding them. His diverse experience includes responding to earthquakes in Haiti, hurricanes in the Philippines, conflict crises in Uganda, Jordan and Syria and resettlement from flooding in Central America.  More about Alex’s experience: https://archenvironment.uoregon.edu/alex-miller-2009

The evening’s time will be divided between a short talk and Q&A.

This Adaptable Refugee Housing lecture is presented by the School of Architecture and Environment and the Global Justice Program with funds provided by the Savage Endowment for International Relations and Peace.