planetary neighborscape

a reparations framework for climate migration with dignity

fall 2022
in collaboration with Jun Lee and Aaron O’Neill

This interdisciplinary landscape + architecture project explores a scenario in which the Netherlands and Germany facilitate climate migration from their former colonies as a form of colonial and climate reparations. This scenario reimagines the rural Dutch tradition of naoberschap, or neighborly responsibility and mutual aid, as an expanded transnational solidarity in the face of the climate crisis. By landing this scenario in Dinxperlo, a small farming community on the eastern Dutch-German border, we explore what physical and social infrastructures might be necessary to both successfully resettle climate refugees and address challenges faced by the receiving community, including drought and a shrinking agricultural economy.

The design proposal is based around three key elements: modular climate refugee housing, bio-based material production to support this new construction, and sustainable land management to increase groundwater storage and prevent drought. We worked to design both material and social processes, which include consensus-building for Dinxperlo residents, phased migration for the sending communities, and knowledge-sharing that puts the climate refugees’ expertise at the center of construction and landscape practices. The physical infrastructure takes the form of a distributed vocational campus that facilitates knowledge exchange between residents and new arrivals around bio-based material production, modular construction, and sustainable forestry and agriculture.

My role was designing the sustainable construction campus, which brings together educational and social spaces for students, floodable agriculture, and pilot sites for the modular housing produced on the campus. Working collaboratively with Jun Lee, a MArch student, we designed a set of interior and exterior spaces that layer productive, educational, cultural, and social functions to imagine how people from disparate communities might live and work together. The landscape and architectural design work together to create flexible scaffolding for new arrivals to shape the built environment and make this new community their home.