The Global Shelter Imaginary

Book excerpt: Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself.