The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has an exhibit up over the
summer entitled “Solution or Utopia? Design for Refugees” that features 50
proposals by architects and designers addressing the needs of the 60 million
refugees around the world displaced from their homes. While most of the
proposals involve industrial design and graphic design (including a proposal
for “Refugees Welcome” cards and window stickers by Minneapolis designer Mike Davis
of Burlesque Design), I found the one urban design proposal the most intriguing:
a new city-state called Europe in Africa (EIA) built on an artificial island on
a shallow part of the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Italy, designed by the
Amsterdam architectural firm TD, with a model by Studio KU+. This city at sea would
provide a secure place for refugees to land and stay as they awaited
assimilation into another country, showing how urban design can help save lives
as well as offer practical, buildable solutions to some of our most pressing
global problems. Tom Fisher
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