AA: Your scholarship often highlights underrepresented voices in architectural history. How can this approach inform the design and implementation of aid architecture in marginalized communities?

EM: Design can go beyond words and make significant contributions to disenfranchised groups by incorporating their voices and ideas into the final project, that is, what Foucault called “subjugated knowledges.”
AA: In rethinking aid architecture, what lessons can be drawn from historical examples where architecture played a role in social justice or injustice?EM: kind of aid organizations, are imbricated in socio-political contexts of donors and donor nations that have their own agendas. Their policies are not always value-free but reflect the norms of those in power, often resulting in neoliberal humanitarianism. How to emancipate aid from these shackles that perpetuate injustice is an ongoing process which requires we try new alternatives, and listen to new voices.
AA: How can methodologies from architectural historiography enhance the processes and methodologies of current aid architecture practices?


EM: Architectural historiography can only help aid architecture if it reinvents itself and comes to reflect a much wider range of cultures beyond the west. It needs to expand its typologies including, for example, informal settlements; to reconceive and pluralize authorship bearing in mind that architects do not build most architecture; to take environmental issues into account; to make sure it leaves behind the eurocentric models that perpetuate coloniality.


AA: Given your focus on social equity, what are the pitfalls in current humanitarian design approaches, and how can they be addressed?


EM: One of the greatest threats is the top-down model that sees the architect as the sole form-giver and legislator for the underprivileged. However praiseworthy their intentions, the result will never be social and spatial justice.



AA: How do you see the role of architectural education evolving to better prepare architects for work in humanitarian contexts?

EM: I believe strongly that architectural education and architectural historiography must be activist and engage with the urgent problems the world is facing today, decentering, if necessary, the exclusive emphasis on beautiful form and buildings in wealthy nations and contexts.



AA: What innovative examples from your research could inspire new paradigms in aid architecture?

EM: In addition to the valuable lessons that can be learned in schools of architecture, we to look beyond what is being taught in traditional curricula. Slums, refugee camps, and informal settlements, where building materials have to be locally-sourced, offer important alternative models. On one hand, residents have to erect their own homes and improvised community centers; on the other, they show a wide spectrum of collaboration with aid organizations, including architects, who are reinventing the field despite stringent economic and political constraints.  



AA: How can architects balance the urgency of humanitarian needs with the imperative to create contextually grounded, culturally respectful, and socially equitable spaces?  

EM: One interesting model now being used in Asia is co-creation (Khondaker Hasibul Kabir, Rizvi Hassan, Marina Tabassum), a needs-based, grass roots practice that works with both migrant groups and host communities. Respectful of their constituents’ different cultures and needs, these architects also ensure that their collaborative and participatory form of architecture is sustainable and respects biodiversity