Omar Degan is a Somali-Italian architect and curator whose work addresses what architecture is for under conditions of conflict, displacement and climate pressure. He is founder and principal of DO Architecture Group, established in Mogadishu in 2017 and among the first architecture practices working from Somalia to be published internationally. The practice builds schools, neighbourhood centres, healthcare infrastructure and cultural spaces in contexts from which the profession has largely been absent. Its work includes the Salsabiil multifunctional building in Mogadishu, a portable rural clinic developed to reach communities beyond the range of fixed facilities, and a proposed memorial to the victims of the October 2017 Mogadishu bombing. Degan has worked with UN-Habitat, the International Organization for Migration, Save the Children, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation and the European Union on architectural responses to displacement, conflict and climate vulnerability. His position is that fragility is not a deficit to be corrected by imported solutions but a condition that produces its own knowledge, and that the communities living it are the authors of that knowledge rather than its beneficiaries. He is founder and director of the Pan-African Biennale, the first continental architecture biennale conceived and led from within Africa, and curator of its inaugural edition in Nairobi. Staged under the theme Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience, it brings together practices from across the continent and its diaspora, and will rotate between African cities. Degan studied at the Politecnico di Torino and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and has taught architecture at Auburn University. He was named an Obama Foundation Leaders Africa fellow in 2022 and serves as a judge for the Dezeen Awards 2026. His talk Architecture, Identity and Reconstructing Somalia, selected for TED.com, has been viewed more than 150,000 times. His work has been covered by The New York Times, Reuters, BBC World Service, Dezeen, ArchDaily and Wallpaper*, and he is the author of Mogadishu Through the Eyes of an Architect (2020) and Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience (DOM publishers, 2026).