International Networking

AHRC Refugee Transition Network

City as commons and transition to sustainable refugee futures

PI: Malé Luján Escalante
PI: Akino Tahir, Resilience Development Initiative, Indonesia
Co-I: Chris Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University

In partnership with:

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".

More about project objectives, activities and outcomes: LINK

It 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.