A Thousand Cuts: Architectures of Displacement by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress examines how architecture and environment-making are entangled with the policing of migration.
About This Book
By mid-2025 some 117.3 million people worldwide were displaced—twice the figure of a decade earlier. Working at the meeting point of scholarship and activism, Angélil and Siress study the material regimes built to keep displaced populations at a distance, using case studies from the world's migration 'hotspots'.
They trace how the right to move and resettle is withheld through border walls, militarised zones, detention and deportation systems, restrictive law, digital surveillance and even buses used to relocate unwanted groups—divisions that no longer map neatly onto a North–South split. The authors also locate sites of resistance, and argue for architecture as an agent against division, proposing concrete countermeasures from a global pact against climate apartheid to inclusive refugee settlements, infrastructure along migration routes and legal assistance.
Key Features
- Case studies drawn from global centres of forced migration
- Brings scholarship and activism together in a single argument
- Sets out concrete countermeasures rather than critique alone
What You'll Discover
- How walls, zones, laws and surveillance tools together form a spatial regime of exclusion
- Where architecture has been complicit with power, and how it might act otherwise
- Why today's lines of separation cut across the old divide between developed and developing worlds
- What inclusive settlements and supportive infrastructure along migration routes could look like
About the Authors
Marc Angélil and Cary Siress write together at the intersection of architectural scholarship and activism. In this book they turn that joint practice to the spatial politics of forced migration.
Specifications
- Format: Softback
- Dimensions: 130 × 227 mm
- Pages: 298
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783944074641
- Publisher: Ruby Press
Perfect For: Architects, planners and students concerned with migration and human rights, and readers looking for a spatial account of contemporary border politics.