Based on the foreground of a prolonged financial crisis, global pandemic, structural and racial violence, Building Solidarity Architectures examines how solidarity and decolonial movements are creating spaces of collective care, filling in as providers of welfare services and in multiple contexts as the first responders in support of disenfranchised communities. By defining state abandonment as a constantly resurging logic of withdrawal of services and maintenance of welfare infrastructures that affects predominantly the most marginalized groups, the proposed book offers the readers a lens to recognize forms of state abandonment in various localities and the potential collective responses to them. The book is also about the materiality that results from this contestation and as such is embedded in primary sources such as participant testimonies, activist texts, visuals, and images, to offer a rich and engaging account of what one could call a “lived architecture” of the everyday practical, immediate, and coping mechanisms of collective care.

Elisavet Hasa is an architect and researcher based in London. In 2022, she was awarded a PhD in architecture from the Royal College of Art, where she has been conducting research since 2016. Hasa is an educator, currently teaching in undergraduate architectural design studios and history and theory courses at London South Bank University and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts in London, where her work concentrates on climate emergency, housing, feminist ethics of care, social movements, and institutionalization politics. Her doctoral thesis draws from her empirical research and participation in mutual aid and solidarity projects in Greece, and her work on the subject has been published and presented on various occasions internationally. Hasa is also the cofounder of Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research studio founded collectively as a space to conduct collaborations to expand new problematics about ecology, care, the domestic, everyday life, and the city.