Joining CCA for a guest lecture titled “Right to Heal: Climate Disaster and Colonial Comfort,” Esra Akcan will share from her new book, Architecture and the Right to Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (Duke University Press, 2025). The book calls for architecture to take an active role in healing communities affected by socioeconomic, political, and environmental disasters. Akcan frames these processes by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to climate change mitigation and transitional justice. Focusing on lands held by the former Ottoman Empire, Akcan highlights the ongoing struggle to heal after internal social, state, and business-led violence ranging from forced disappearance to mass extinction. She argues that while architecture and urban planning have been weaponized to segregate and subjugate minorities throughout history, they could instead confront systemic violence and make accountability and reparations possible, putting forth the concept of resettler nationalism as a source of displacement and partition.

Esra Akcan is Professor of Architecture at Cornell University and author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, also published by Duke University Press; Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA 1984/87; and Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture.