Refugee cities Flashcards
Picker and Pasquetti (2015)
The camp is usually something that is developed as a response to crisis; but this often takes on a more formalized and permanent structure over time
Although regularly built as emergency devices for the management of displaced and undesirable populations, and justified as temporary necessities, camps often turn into durable socio-spatial formations whose logics of functioning and effects are articulated at the intersection of global, state and urban scale.
Agier (2002)
Camps present particular temporal conditions; they are sites of permanent temporariness (no clear end point). The social life of camps as “quarantine is their horizon”. The camp essentially acts as a border of containment within the nation state. The populations contained within these borders are deemed problematic in some way.
BUT the very survival of the camp and its organization creates opportunity for encounters, exchanges and reworking of the identities of those who reside there. The people who are forced into this massively reproduced segregation have to redefine themselves within a wholly unknown and unprecedented context
Example: Dadaab, in North-Eastern Kenya
The refugees are grouped into various blocks according to their origin, ethnicity and even clan status. All are given the same materials to live off (tarp, mattress and some kitchen utensils)
However, what has been emerging are different configurations of the space. In the Ethiopian neighbourhoods, there are high population densities with narrow alley ways and high fences. However, the Somalian areas are characterised by family enclosures with sparse spaces in between these dwellings.
In all cases there are the emergence of small ‘businesses’ (although not technically legal). These are generally funded by remittances. These activities presuppose the uses that transform the everyday vision that refugees have of space in their daily lives.
This case study brings into light a social differentiation within a camp. Camps create identity (both ethnic and non-ethnic) more so than they reproduce, maintain of reinforce. They are a relational and dynamic experience with identity
The camp engenders experiences of hybrid socialization that is plural.
Agamben (1998)
The camp has a military origin, but by the 19th century they began to play a role in the management of populations.
In this context, camps were built to confine colonial populations and prevent uprisings. They were a mechanism of containment and control. It was a form of governmentality that spread through colonial powers.
However, by the 20th century camps became the central mechanism of subjection, concentration and murder
Malkki (2002)
Argues that increasingly camps are morphing into incomplete forms of urbanism- they are cities that never quite become cities; they are on the cusp of becoming
BUT, others like Agier (2002) argues that they are spaces of urban potential that need to be fully realised; houses replacing tents, road networks, service provision and forms of employment all begin to emerge.
Dalal (2013)
Example: Zaatari Camp, Jordan
Jordan currently hosts 655,000 Syrian refugees (many of which are living in this camp). This camp was established during an acceleration of mobility into Jordan from Syria- relief agencies were given 19 days to establish this base.
The initial plan to host 15,000 refugees was rapidly exceeded. The camp expanded in an informal and unplanned way, pushing the boundaries of the camps borders
As a response, the UNHCR expanded the camp but also imposed a planning model; dividing the camp into districts. In 2013, there is another wave of mobility increasing numbers from around 50,000 to 200,000 in May. This places huge pressure on the camp and many people were squatting informally.
Kriechauf (2018)
Kreichauf (2018) terms the ‘campization’ of refugee infrastructure in Europe. This refers to the built structures that are not suited for housing are increasingly being used to house refugees
The growth of camps in Europe serves three purposes…
1) Containment ensures that refugees remain subjects of the state
2) Development of camps as a means of employing and legitimating exclusive alien acts – camps justify the legal framings of exclusivity
3) Camps make refugee groups visible and begin a process of ‘territorial stigmatization’
There is a problem with this strategy in negotiating how to move from this space as an emergency response to the process of integration with the wider population. In an attempt to do so, the government developed ‘tempohomes’ across the city BUT this did not necessarily increase integration.
Case study: Athens
After the closing of the Balkans route in 2015 and the EU-Turkey agreement, the role of the city changed from short term assistance to long-term responsibilities of refugees. This has forced the city to provide broader based support and accommodation. The majority of these sites are in secluded areas that are fenced and controlled. It has been identified that the state has failed to provide basic humanitarian services in all of these sites; prompting NGOs and volunteers to fill the gaps.
Case study: Hovestaden, Copenhagen
This city has had a long tradition of accommodating asylum seekers. BUT, most shelters are located remotely from any urban settlements. This is part of Denmark’s objective to segregate asylum seekers into remote areas and disperse accepted refugees into low-immigrant areas. Neither asylum seekers, nor accepted refugees have the legal opportunity to live in Copenhagen or its suburbs.
Tsavdaroglou (2018)
In the Athenian context, state-run refugee camps included ‘overcrowded dilapidated factories, old military bases and an abandoned airport’
This encouraged the role of squatting as a form of activism. Combined solidarity activism between migrant groups and other marginalised populations, with a desire to reclaim the visibility of refugees as present in the city.
Squire (2017)
Argues that “Coming together in solidarity […] opens up an understanding of how precarious lives that are imperfectly shared can challenge the production of vulnerable or disposable subjects”
Example: City Plaza, Athens
This is a disguised hotel that has been occupied by 380 refugees since 2016. This has been supported by a range of local and visiting activists across Europe.
This operation does not include people on the basis of vulnerability; inclusion is based on the diversity that individuals will bring to the collective community. Part of squatting here involves activities to maintain to community and collective identity.
The hotel is a site of solidarity within a diverse set of precarious lives. It is critique of the humanitarian focus on vulnerability as a category of inclusion
“As more than simply a refugee squat it [City Plaza] is occupied by a collective of refugee, student, and solidarity activists, and involves a relatively sophisticated approach to communal living and community decision-making”.
Oesch (2017)
The refugee camp had been widely captures are an extra-territorial space of exception. In camps, refugees are stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life
We should be looking at the camp within a framework of ambiguity; it is simultaneously a space of inclusion and exclusion- the author terms this a zone of indistinction.
Case Study: Al- Huessein camp, Jordan
This camp was planned in a disciplinary and functional way. It has a regular grid plan that stands out from the other urban infrastructure that surrounds it. The camp was therefore planned as a space designated to host a population which was perceived as homogenous
Most of the facilities are located in the centre of the camp. This reflects Bentham’s panopticon- providing care and control at the same time. The ration distribution building is located in the centre of the city and has a rooftop terrace that that government own- providing a 360 view of the camp from above
BUT, although the camp has official boundaries is does not have any physical manifestations of these boundaries. This is a conciliation of discipline and liberalism- allowing circulation inwards and outwards of the camp.
This is mainly due to the fact that Palestinian refugees were not required by law to live in a camp- they were instead set up to assist poor refugees who needed assistance. The camp is now fully integrated into the built environment. Inhabitants are even able to sell or rent their houses (not legal but it tolerated).
Darling (2017)
Looking at the city with the lens of refugees offers insight into the dynamics of refugee experiences of increasingly fragmented forms of sovereign authority of exceptional spaces of borer control.
The refugee camp is constructed as the ‘proper’ space for refugee populations. It is a technology of spatial segregation that enables to containment of those displaced. This can be seen to be actively preventing integration into societies.
HOWEVER, many camps are now becoming part of cities, or are at least on the margins of the urban. Urban refugees are only a recent concern of the UNHCR, moving beyond considering these people as anomalies and spontaneous groups, lacking the legitimacy of those in camps. But, it is only when refugee mobility is ordered through practices of managed resettlement that a shift from camp to city is framed as a solution rather than intrusion.
The role of the city becomes a container for individuals whose lives are placed on hold by the classification of sovereign attempts to manage migration. Cities and their inhabitants are denied the agency to shape the dispersal process
The role of the city in border control must also must be recognized. Cities are increasingly practicing modes of local border controls. The border is extended into everyday life and the city is situated as a strategic location to do so.
Informality in the city is highlighting the ever-shifting urban relationship between the legal/illegal, legitimate/Illegitimate and the authorized/unauthorized. These practices constantly question the definitional limits and conditions of the formal.
