Aerial view of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan — at a population of around 82,000, the world's largest camp for Syrian refugees. Photo: U.S. Department of State/Flickr

With the horizon of increased global instability closer than ever, whereby the scales of political balance can be so quickly tipped and toppled, questions relating to the rights of displaced peoples in refugee camps are both pertinent and vital. Yet, since refugee camps are becoming increasingly ‘urban’ in terms of scale, population density, social processes, and physical manifestation through schools, clinics, roads, and infrastructure, the questions surrounding refugee camp design and camp dwellers’ rights inherently become architectural and urban matters.

Over the course of civilization, the term “camp” has evolved in meaning. Responding to the differing societal pressures of the time, the designation has changed from spaces of military grounding to containers of leisurely games. The word today, however, has evolved to wear a more sadistic mask than its leisurely predecessors. It defines a space that isolates and detains, controls and prohibits, and divides citizenship from statelessness; a definition that is made physical through refugee camps.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines the refugee camp as a place “intended as a temporary accommodation for people who have been forced to flee their home because of violence and persecution.” However, the reality is more ambiguous, particularly in terms of temporariness. For example, the Kakuma refugee camp (population of around 200,000) in Kenya is thirty years old. The Dadaab complex (hosting around 220,000 refugees), also in Kenya, is thirty-one years old. Tanzania's Katumba camp (providing shelter to over 66,000 refugees) was established in 1972, and the Jordan-based Palestinian Zarqa refugee camp (population of approximately 20,000) in 1949. Since around two-thirds of refugees encounter protracted situations for many years, the complex reality of ‘permanent’ camps, combined with their increasing urbanity, blurs the boundaries between the camp and the city, urban dwelling and slum-like dwelling, citizen agency and inhibited agency, and statelessness and citizenship.

The questions surrounding refugee camp design and camp dwellers’ rights inherently become architectural and urban matters.

As these communities grow from temporary small tent camps into more permanent and solid brick metropolises, the growth of civil rights for camp inhabitants fails to solidify in the same manner. This contrasts starkly with the development of cities, despite their urban similarities. To emulate this in refugee camps, it’s necessary to examine camps without considering them as something other than a fully functioning urban environment. The existence of schools, clinics, residences, and markets that often emerge within refugee camps warrants this consideration. 

By seeing the camp in this light, it may then be possible to design spaces that erase the negative paradigms that camps often embody — rightlessness, statelessness, and lack of refugee autonomy. Put differently, if the camp looks like a city, functions like a city, and serves as the backdrop for the everyday activities of its inhabitants in the same way a city does, then why not consider it one? That way, perhaps camps can be recognized as more than mere holding pens to keep refugees alive.

The city, the camp, and the society within. Why might considering the camp as a city mitigate the social problems that camps create?

The problem is multifaceted and paradoxical. Camps accommodate living, as cities do. Camps facilitate markets, commerce, and trade, as cities do. Camps provide health services and education, as cities do. However, citizens within cities aren’t stateless, but refugees are. Citizens within cities aren’t generally marginalized, but refugees are. Citizens within cities aren’t nonautonomous, but refugees are.

The camp’s incapacity to create or encourage any form of citizenship is problematic. However, conceptualizing the camp as a city allows for it to become a politically active space whereby the urban dweller can claim their rights by virtue of being an urban dweller. This includes the right to participate, just as the public has the right to participate in urban decisions in their respective cities (think public consultations, design boards, planning applications, voting, etc). For this to be implemented within the refugee camp, we must focus on how camp spaces can be designed to encourage refugee participation since it’s those who build and sustain urban life that has a primary claim to it. This right to participate, which has the potential to shape the built environment of the camp, citizenship rights, and political activity, ensures the camp can become more than simply a life-sustaining holding pen; and considering the camp as a city engenders this right to participate.

Moreover, while guaranteeing that the camp inhabitants will have a key role in making any decisions that would affect the construction and upkeep of the camp, the right to participate promotes and nurtures refugee agency and autonomy as opposed to merely obeying the humanitarian actors to construct camps in accordance with the United Nations Handbook in camp design (yes, that’s a thing).

As these communities grow from temporary small tent camps into more permanent and solid brick metropolises, the growth of civil rights for camp inhabitants fails to solidify in the same manner.

Although many camps are experiencing rapid population increase alongside the realities of becoming more and more permanent, refugee camps continue to be regarded as a social disgrace; a stigma that tends to eclipse the realities of a camp’s community manifested through the refugee’s social exchanges. Through the daily acts of inhabiting, refugees can adapt the generalized and scientific camp design outlined in the Handbook with personal meanings and change it into a lived space of identity and belonging. This notion has already been observed in some protracted camps, whereby unofficial street names have been assigned to spaces.

By doing so, meaning can be assigned to camp public space. This is important because it is within the public space that a person develops into a citizen since it is this space that — through the process of living out everyday experiences — accommodates a person’s actions towards another. Similarly, it is within the public space where demonstrative action and debates concerning collective agendas are voiced. For centuries, city populations have relied on public space to express their cries and demands. As such, public space has developed into both the physical depiction of democracy and a space whereby said democracy is turned into action. It, therefore, seems an essential space for refugee camps so that camp dwellers can articulate their collective desires.

It’s possible, for that reason, that reimagining the urbanity of the refugee camp through the lens of the city appears to change the camp from a space of marginalization and humanitarian governance — which can lead to refugee frustration and, in turn, stress, anger, and potentially rage — into a place of citizenship rights, dialogue, and practice. This approach may then change how politics, people, and practices interact with a camp and mitigate the stigma surrounding camps and refugees.

By considering the camp as a city, refugee rights are guaranteed through urban dwelling, political action, social relations, and living out the everyday routines of the city. In doing so, refugee camps gain meaning as a place.