Afterword

Abstract

The Afterword closes on contemporary arts and architectural practices, learning from work commissioned as part of the process of writing this book, which honors the landscape of pasts and futures a refugee camp opens onto, and tests the arguments made in these pages. “Poetry is a weapon that we use in both war and peace,” sings the Somali poet Hadraawi. Thinking with the esthetic and oral traditions carried on by migrants, I argue that the same may be said of architecture. This book looks to the architecture and history of the Dadaab refugee camps for the poetic “weapon” of critical heritage, which endures through war or peace.