„Beyond Camps. Co-Designing Urban Futures for Displaced and Host Communities in Abuja“: Wanderausstellung der Klasse für Entwerfen und Städtebau

Eröffnung: Dienstag, 13. Oktober 2026, 18 Uhr
Laufzeit: 14.10.–20.10.2026

Wassa, on the southern edge of Abuja, is a place of displacement upon displacement. Its houses were built in 2014 by the federal government to resettle communities displaced by the implementation of the Abuja masterplan. Within months they also became home to thousands who had fled the Boko Haram insurgency in Borno State. More than a decade later, over seven thousand internally displaced persons and some two thousand host residents live there, on land administered by the Federal Capital Territory Administration, without secure tenure, reliable water, electricity, or a permanent clinic. The state continues to classify Wassa as temporary. The exhibition takes that classification as its starting point and argues that it is a decision, and one that could have been made differently.

The work begins with the women of Wassa, who fetch the water, grow and cook the food, care for children and the elderly, build shade and extend their houses, and in doing so supply the infrastructure the settlement has never received. A first part traces how insurgent violence, patriarchy, and the refusal of the state combine in their daily lives. Three design scenarios then ask what a settlement would look like that no longer depended on this unpaid labor: a city organized around care, a city that feeds itself, and a city built to endure heat and drought. Each is drawn at the scale of a house, a cluster, and the settlement as a whole.

Die Ausstellung ist das Ergebnis der Klasse für Entwerfen + Städtebau aus dem Studiengang Architektur in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Department of Architecture der University of Lagos,  sowie mit den Studierenden Jasmin Andrianos und Josephine Bartl der Klasse Cluss aus dem Studiengang Kommunikationsdesign.

Leitung: Prof. Fabienne Hoelzel, AM Metadel Sileshi Belihu und AM Lisa Dautel

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Heinrich Böll Stiftung Abuja.