Retreat / Rebuild Keynote

Disaster recovery is entrenched in the landscape. Lives are put at risk when land heaves, slides or shakes, when it becomes inundated or undergoes drought, when it is submitted to unrestrained development. Thus, land issues are at the crux of conflicts and post conflict reconstruction efforts alike. And yet, disaster response operations – focused on alleviating suffering and meeting immediate human needs – cannot account for the fluidity and longer time horizons that define the risk.

As a result, land rarely serves as the primary topic of research in the humanitarian field. This conference brings into view the necessarily fluid effects that disasters have on the land and the humanitarian action that unfolds in response, with the aim of furthering the necessary collaboration between humanitarians and designers.

This Keynote is part of the Retreat | Rebuild Colloquium, a collaboration between the Harvard HumanitarianInitiative and Harvard Graduate School of Design. This event is free and open to the public.

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