View winning proposal
The 2016 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship has been awarded to Abel Feleke from the University of Western Australia for his proposal, ‘Weaving the Urban Fabric: Examining the Significance of Community’.
Abel’s study will take him to China, India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mexico and Brazil to learn from the strong sense of community that binds informal settlements. He quotes Kalpana Sharma, “A slum is not a chaotic collection of structures; it is a dynamic collection of individuals who have figured out how to survive in the most adverse of circumstances”, and will explore the intricate social networks that have evolved in these environments.
The scholarship jury was chaired by Lord Foster with Julia Barfield (Marks Barfield Architects), RIBA President Jane Duncan, Professor Flora Samuel (University of Reading); and Stefan Behling, Spencer de Grey, and Piers Heath of Foster + Partners.
The jury highly commended ‘Mapping In-Betweenness: A multi-disciplinary study of transient refugee camps’ by Seyedeh Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Seyedeh wins a camera for her proposal to investigate what the response of architects should be to the refugee crisis in Europe.