We are living in an age increasingly shaped by a continuous and constructed condition of emergency. Climate disruption, systemic inequality, forced displacement, and ecological degradation are not anomalies but interwoven dynamics that define the present. Emergency has become foundationalâ an organizing framework that governs how we perceive, inhabit, and respond to a changing world. Architectures of Emergency examines how emergency is not only managed but actively constructedâ with the complicity of architecture, urbanism, and designâ as it is sensed, spatialized, and institutionalized across scales.

Contemporary governance often frames emergencies as isolated, urgent events to be managed through technocratic control. Such framings obscure the slow violence, uneven vulnerabilities, and embodied knowledge that shape how emergencies are lived and remembered. Emergency becomes a tool of abstraction, implemented through protocols, command centers, and anticipatory infrastructures that seek to restore normative â order.â Architecture, in this system, risks becoming a passive executor of global scriptsâ producing climate-smart bunkers, resilient masterplans, and securitized zones devoid of care, memory, or participation.

This thesis draws from experiences in which architecture works otherwiseâ becoming relation and care: a practice that empowers communities through situated knowledges, shared vulnerabilities, and collective attunements. It opens space for slower gestures and alternative imaginaries for living with disturbance.

The thesis unfolds in two movements. The first, The Intrusion of Emergency, traces a genealogy of architectures of emergencyâ laws, command centers, infrastructures, and protocolsâ that institutionalize emergency as a spatial regime. The second, Becoming-Emergency, invites us to recompose these architectures through feminist figurations, sentinel attentions, and ecologies of careâ toward softer, situated, and collective forms of spatial practice.

The research is grounded in territories I have inhabitedâ Murcia (Spain), Geneva (Switzerland), Brooklyn (USA), and Maroantsetra (Madagascar)â shaped by lived encounters with flooding, risk infrastructures, and activist counter-practices. These situated engagements inform a broader framework: the Atlas of Inhabiting Emergency, a collective cartographic methodology that traces shared vulnerabilities, spatial resonances, and practices of care across geographies. Together, they form the foundation for a transdisciplinary methodology grounded in place, perception, and cohabitation.

Unfolding as both a cartographic and choreographic inquiry, this research traces how infrastructures, bodies, and imaginaries navigate and are shaped by emergency. From experimental design rituals to protocols of care, it reveals how alternative architectures can surface within the fissures of emergency managementâ architectures that attune rather than surveil, that govern through relation rather than control.

Ultimately, this research argues for a shift: from emergency as spectacle to emergency as method; from containment to cohabitation; from resilience to relational survival. It explores an open-ended spatial, political and ethical practice for staying with the trouble of our timeâ a time shaped by emergency.