City as commons and transition to sustainable refugee futures
Principle Investigators: Malé Luján Escalante, Akino Tahir, Resilience Development Initiative, Indonesia
Co-Investigator: Chris Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University
Refugee Transition Network is funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Project Partners
Resilience Development Initiative Indonesia – Urban Refugee
Richard Thickpenny – The New Penny
Ashley Community & Housing Ltd (ACH)
The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN)
Southwark Council
Design Ethnography Lab, Bandung Institute of Technology
Transition Design as an emerging framework proposes collaborative design-led practices as a vehicle to create new narratives and approaches needed to address complex (‘wicked’) problems and transitions towards more sustainable futures.It has been developed and used with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems (TEK) found in indigenous and local communities to re-design visions of their own development and systemic change. However, there is little evidence of its application in the context of forced displaced populations.
Our interest was to explore how transition design informs co-creating processes of new, much needed, narratives about urban refugee management, that would support a shift from the focus of “what refugees lack” towards “what refugees bring”.
Project Objectives
- To create the Refugee Transition Network (RTN) with relevant academic and non-academic partners, such as researchers, stakeholders, practitioners, observers, and refugee-led organisations. Through the network, we intend to further reinforce relations, create memorandum of understanding, and assemble a steering group with relevant partners for future research projects.
- To gather cases of good practice and successful methods in the use of Transition Design and the ‘City as Commons’ in the context of urban refugee management to create a bilingual (English and Bahasa) teaching resource.
- To gather initial insights from creative workshops applying the Transition Design framework with practitioners and communities of refugees, in the UK and Indonesia.
Project Activites
Our work was presented at the The 20th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration Conference (IASFM20) at Yogyakarta,2025 where we chaired a the track “Creative and Designerly Methods”.
Upcoming: Refugee Transition Network is releasing a pedagogical methods book entitled Pluriversal Ways of Knowing: A Methods Book: Creatives ways to make communities for transition, to be published in 2025.
