Associate Professor and Chair of Growth and Structure of Cities Min Kyung Lee is one of the co-editors organizing a year-long series of essays on migration and the built environment for the online journal Platform. The series will feature monthly contributions from built environment, landscape, and architectural historians who study migration.
In the first installment of the series, Lee and co-authors and collaborators Sarah Lopez, associate professor at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, and Arijit Sen, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and founder of the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School, offer new methods in the spatial study of migration and argue for the necessity of recognizing the centrality of movement in shaping our environments. The goal is to understand how migration is integral to shaping and giving meaning to the spaces we all inhabit by developing analytical frameworks in the discipline of architectural history, which has previously excluded migrants as marginal.
From the article:
“People who migrate match state violence and environmental tragedy with resilience, ingenuity, strategy, and dignity, creating spaces that are meaningful. By repositioning people for whom migration may be a way of life as central actors in the production of the built environment, we dismantle any singular definition of who the “migrant” is, here replaced by the specificity of what people make and do as they embed movement into place.”
This work is a continuation of the migration research that Lee did with the New Directions Mellon Fellowship she received in 2021 on how wigs and plywood, two of Korea’s major post-Korean War exports, are part of a novel history of the American urban landscape that weaves together the growth of the South Korean economy and the experiences of Korean Americans and African Americans.