Thursday, October 24, 6:30-8:00pm
This event is open to the public online.
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Designing Within Conflict Webinar: Reconstruction and Redestruction: Post-War Antinomies

In times of war, the destruction of the built environment stands out as a profoundly traumatic act of violence against a collective, a nation, a people. “We expect people to die,” writes Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic. “A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us, forever.” However, the destruction of the built environment is not confined to times of war. Dominant powers and neoliberal forces exploit disasters, crises, and shocks to impose new values, narratives, and forms that similarly disrupt the cities and spaces we live in. Especially in post-war environments, reconstruction and “redestruction” are often difficult to disentangle when discussing rebuilding environments that were ruined in war.

In this conversation, Senior Loeb Scholar Malkit Shoshan will discuss the complexities of postwar reconstruction with Andrew Herscher, a professor of architecture at University of Michigan whose work explores the architecture of political violence, migration, and displacement, and Daniel Serwer, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations and professorial lecturer in the Conflict Management Program.

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The lecture series is co-hosted by the Senior Loeb Fellowship Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard ArtLab, MDes Publics and the the Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar, Harvard GSD.