Beyond Camps

Co-Designing Urban Futures for Displaced and Host Communities in Abuja

Photograph: Fabienne Hoelzel, Abuja, March 2026

This design studio addresses one of Nigeria's most urgent humanitarian and urban challenges: the long-term integration of internally displaced persons fleeing Boko Haram violence and climate-induced displacement in Northern Nigeria into host communities in the Abuja region. With limited prospects for return, the studio reframes displacement not as a temporary condition but as an occasion to develop sustainable, inclusive, and dignified settlement strategies that benefit both IDPs—predominantly women and children—and the host communities receiving them.

The studio begins from a refusal. It refuses to design camps—temporary emergency structures that routinely become permanent under conditions of chronic displacement. It refuses to treat displaced people as a population to be managed and host communities as passive backdrop. And it refuses the assumption that dignified urban integration is primarily a technical problem awaiting a technical solution.

Instead, the studio develops three radical urban design scenarios for Wassa. Each scenario is structured around a different central question, a different analytical commitment, and a different spatial proposition. They are developed in parallel precisely because radicality requires commitment: a proposal that tries to be everything will be nothing. Students are expected to defend their scenario's position—and, through the structured scenario collision session midway through the semester, to understand where their proposal falls short and where another scenario compensates.

The semester operates across two interconnected scales. At the architectural scale, proposals focus on housing typologies that enable incremental construction and modification by residents, with particular attention to women's agency in building and adapting their own spaces. At the urban design scale, proposals develop spatial strategies for integrating IDP and host populations into a shared settlement structure, ensuring access to infrastructure, services, and economic opportunity for all residents.

The studio is conducted in collaboration with the University of Lagos, the University of Abuja, and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Abuja. The semester culminates in two public exhibitions: the Rundgang at ABK Stuttgart in July and a subsequent exhibition at the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Abuja in October 2026, where the work will be presented to policymakers, practitioners, NGOs, and affected communities.

THE OVERARCHING QUESTION

The studio does not ask: how do we integrate this population? It asks: what kind of city do these people deserve—and who decides?

The Three Scenarios:

The studio develops three scenarios in parallel, each assigned to one group. Each scenario is structured around a central question that it answers with full analytical and design commitment—and two questions it deliberately leaves open, which the other scenarios are required to address in their cross-scenario panels.

The City of Invisible Labor:

What does the city look like when it is designed around the full scope of women's labor—reproductive, productive, and communal—rather than around the adult male worker's day?

The Productive City:

How does the agricultural knowledge that IDP women carry from Northern Nigeria become a structuring force in urban form—not as decoration or community garden, but as spatial and economic logic?

The City That Endures:

How does the built environment achieve genuine thermal livability in a hot, dry savanna climate without mechanical cooling—through material intelligence, spatial organization, and the integration of existing adaptive knowledge?