Architectures of Care

The world is confronting interconnected crises, including climate breakdown, environmental damage, armed conflicts, health emergencies, and recurring disasters, which have intensified social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities. These crises, whether arising from armed conflict, environmental degradation, or natural hazards such as earthquakes, lead to displacement, dispossession, homelessness, damage, violence, trauma, injuries, and the collapse of systems supporting both human and non-human life. Human activities disrupt natural systems, resulting in resource loss and a significant decline in biodiversity. Unsustainable practices such as excessive land, water, and energy use, pollution, and climate change are the leading causes of these crises. Specifically in Turkey, recurrent earthquakes, floods, wildfires, mining disasters, and ongoing conflicts show that social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities are not isolated events but structural issues, highlighting the uneven distribution of risk, responsibility, and protection.

 

In this context, it is crucial to consider the thought-provoking question posed by political theorist Judith N. Shklar: “When is a disaster a misfortune, and when is it an injustice?”[1] This inquiry is especially relevant when examining how a natural disaster can escalate into a broader public injustice through human action, systemic neglect, or unequal access to care.

 

Thus, the design and research graduate studio calls for reflection on the theme of “care.” Care—for whom, by whom, under what conditions, and to what ends?

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Care should not be seen merely as a response to crises; instead, it is closely tied to the political, economic, and spatial factors that determine whose lives are protected and whose suffering remains hidden or becomes normalized. Using care as an analytical lens exposes these asymmetries. Rather than seeing care as merely a benevolent act, this perspective understands it as a set of practices rooted in power dynamics, responsibility, and dependency. Care, often linked with protectiveness and obligation, involves close attentiveness to avoiding danger and includes actions like reconstructing, repairing, restoring, conserving, and fixing. However, practices of care can also fail or become mechanisms of control, exclusion, or erasure; these failures must themselves become objects of architectural inquiry. 

 

The Architectures of Care studio views architecture broadly, not just as buildings but also as infrastructures, institutions, policies, landscapes, and socio-spatial relations, shifting the focus from designing care facilities to exploring urban and territorial conditions of care. The studio invites architecture graduate students to investigate care as an architectural concern. Students will explore architectures of care from various perspectives through situational, relational, and systemic design approaches. They will examine how the ethics of care, cultivated by social justice activists and eco-feminists, can inspire alternative social, spatial, and environmental futures. 

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[1] Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 1.