Enhancing Disaster Preparedness: From Humanitarian Architecture to Community Resilience

Since 2013 Dr. Martins has been an integrated researcher of CIAUD, the Research Centre for Architecture, Urbanism, and Design, within the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon with a project addressing risk, resilience as well as humanitarian architecture for disaster-prone and informal-settlement environments. In the past three years, he has chaired major global conferences and design competitions focused on risk, resilience, and humanitarian architecture. As a project manager of the NGO Building 4Humanity, Design, and Reconstructing Communities Association, he has been leading multidisciplinary teams in projects and missions in Portugal, Africa, and Brazil. The outcomes of the action-research fieldwork have been presented in conferences in the areas of sustainability, urban disaster as well as design in development, and subsequently published in proceedings, books, and journals. His current research interests include the re-visitation of the concept of incremental housing and the introduction of humanitarian architecture into architectural education.

Dr. Mahmood Fayazi is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Disaster Management and Reconstruction (IDMR) at Sichuan University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. At the same time, he is an invited professor at the School of Architecture, Université de Montréal. Drawing on discourses of resilience, vulnerability, and climate change adaptation, his research focuses on explaining why and how environment disturbances and climate change pressures impact human settlements. Currently, he leads some research initiatives focusing on the impacts of reconstruction projects on rural communities after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in China. Also, in close collaboration with several scholars in Canada, he investigates causal factors of vulnerability and the impacts of post-flood interventions on households, neighborhoods, and cities in Quebec, Canada. Dr. Fayazi has published a book, several scholarly articles, and presented his research findings at many international conferences around the globe.

Faten Kikano is a researcher and a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at Université de Montréal. She is affiliated with Œuvre Durable, a multi-university research group focused on vulnerability, resilience, and sustainable reconstruction. Following 20 years of experience as a practitioner in architecture and design and as an instructor in the most prestigious universities in Lebanon, she oriented her career towards research in refugee spaces. Her study explores the impact of refugees’ institutional, economic and social conditions on the process of space appropriation in refugee spaces—urban accommodations, informal encampment, and organized camps. Her research bridges the gap between misrepresentations of refugee spaces as temporary solutions and the protracted conditions of most refugee situations. Findings of her research enable her to set a practical framework for governments and institutions with policies aiming at the implementation of appropriate living environments for refugees and sustainable solutions in host countries. Her project focuses on the case of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Her study is funded by the prestigious Armand Bombardier scholarship of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She has participated in several international academic, humanitarian, and artistic activities and published a number of scholarly articles and book chapters related to forced migration.

Liliane Hobeica is an architect-urbanist whose research activities have been following a broad disciplinary approach. After three master degrees, in urbanism, human ecology, and risk sciences, she concluded in 2018 a PhD in risk sciences, in which she explored the potentials of spatial design as a flood-adaptation tool within urban-riverfront interventions. She is currently interested in the social dimensions of flood adaptation, community-based resilient design, and risk mainstreaming in architectural practices.