A Pandemic of Vulnerability: Is Design a Painkiller or a Vaccine?

Natural disasters, climate change, war conflicts, unequal socio-economic growth, technological changes, and massive urban migrations continuously produce vulnerable conditions in local communities all over the world. The response to these situations, through design and physical planning, has in some cases solved the problems, while in others, only generated temporary relief. The paper examines a number of cases in different contexts, such as the new settlements after the Fukushima explosion, the war refugee cities of Za’atar in Jordan and Dadaab in Kenya, shrinking obsolete industrial cities in Poland, migrant farmers camps in Spain and Italy and urban-rural migration in India, in order to identify significant contemporary vulnerability issues and highlight the potential of design, imagining correct and durable solutions.