From Shelters to Dwellings

Front matter

AYHAM DALAL

THE ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP

In Zaatari camp, Jordan, thousands of Syrian refugees were sheltered in tents and caravans, which they steadily appropriated and turned into dwellings that responded to their social and cultural needs. In this book, Ayham Dalal takes a closer look at this remarkable transformation. He draws on the tension between ‘the shelter’ and ‘the dwelling’ to unravel how new spaces unfold in between them, where refugees become architects and the camp is dismantled and reassembled.

Chapter 2

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Chapter 5

The Caravan

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Tents, Zinco and Cement

An architecture can be compared to language, and the act of dwelling to speech’ Henri Lefebvre (2014, 53)

List of Acronyms

DRC Danish Refugee Council

IDP Internally Displaced Person

IFRC International Federations of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

INGO International Non-Governmental Organization

JHCO Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization

JRC Jordan Red Crescent

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

NRC Norwegian Refugee Council

OHCHR Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

QIZ Quality Industrial Zone

PVC Polyvinyl Chloride

SNC Saudi National Campaign

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNOSAT/UNITAR United Nations Institute for Training and Research — Operational Satellite Applications Programme

UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund VIP Very Important Person WASH Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

WFP World Food Programme

List of Arabic Words

Al-Sakan

Battaniyh

Beit (or Bayt)

Beit el-‘Ayleh

Hadar means ‘the dwelling’. It is derived from the verb Sakana, which indicates that something has settled in place or become calm after turmoil. For example, Sakana al-Bahr means that the sea has become calm. Another derivation of the word is Sakina, which means tranquillity, stillness and gracefulness.

means an ‘underlying garment or textile used to support something else’. It originates from the word Battana, which describes the act of supporting something by stuffing it from the inside. Derived from it is the word Batin, which can be equated with something located inside, thus ‘inner and invisible’.

means ‘the house’, ‘the home’ or ‘the place of residence and settlement’. Etymologically, the word originates from the verb yabit, which denotes ‘the act of sleeping somewhere at night’. However, the verb has strong connotations of safety, security, protection and the type of generosity associated with being a host. For instance, Beit ul-Lah is the ‘house of God’, the mosque, and Ahmad yabit at Samer would mean the former is being hosted at the house of the latter.

means ‘the family house’. Although it refers to a specific physical space, it also holds emotional connotations. This is because the word is used to describe the dwelling in which large family gatherings usually take place, and thus the word is linked to emotions associated with warmth and solidarity. In certain contexts, it can also be used to refer to someone's class, ethnicity or origins; for example, ‘this used to be their Beit el-‘Ayleh’.

means ‘the city dwellers’. The word originates from Hadara, which means ‘civilization’, and is connected to the early writings on urbanization and city dwellers in the works of the Tunisian philosopher Ibn Khaldun. It is nevertheless used colloquially to differentiate between city and village dwellers, or between the ‘settled’ populations and the ‘nomadic’ populations or the Bedouins. Thus, the word has

Hakoura

Jam'iyh

Kafil

Madafa

Mufawadiyh

Mukhtar an implicit class dimension that perceives the Hadar as the ‘civilized’ and the others (the nomads) as the ‘uncivilized’.

means ‘the farmland or ‘the garden/farm attached to a house’. In the Syrian context, the word is common among villagers and farmers, but is less frequently used among city dwellers. This is because the Hakoura constitutes an important proportion of dwellings in rural regions. Some resources consider the origins of the word Hakoura to be Phoenician, meaning ‘empty land’. This may reveal historical connections between farming, land and dwellings in the region. means a ‘collective body’, referring to an institutional entity that has a local character, similar to a Community-Based Organization (CBO). However, in Syria, and when used without any institutional context, it refers to a circulatory monetary system, in which individuals make a monthly financial contribution. The money is then pooled and allocated to one of the participants each month.

means ‘sponsor’ or ‘guardian’. The Kafil emerged as an important figure during the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan. The role is often taken on by a male Jordanian sponsor who fulfils certain criteria and is willing to sponsor a Syrian refugee to be ‘bailed out’ from the camp and subsequently relocated to an urban area. The importance of this system fluctuated over time; it has thus not been consistent, but has remained influential for many refugees.

means ‘the space of hospitality’. The word originates from Deyafa, which denotes the act of hosting others and being generous to guests and visitors. This term is particularly important in the context of Arab culture, and especially among tribes, where the act of Deydfa is associated and equated with dignity and pride. The establishment of Madafa in the Arab region therefore became important, but varied according to the context and the degree of urbanization. While many villagers and nomadic populations have a specific space for the Madafa, this space is less common in cities, but may still be found among large extended families and tribes.

means ‘the agency’. The word comes from the Arabic translation for the UNHCR or the UN Refugees Agency. In Zaatari camp and among Syrian refugees in general, the UNHCR is colloquially referred to as the Mufawadiyh.

means ‘the chief of a village or a locality’. It is derived from the word ikhtara, which means that ‘someone has made a choice’. In the Syrian context, the Mukhtar is not elected, but instead represents a form of emergent or organic leader who carries out the duty of locally governing a village or area. The Mukhtar usually has good connections

Tanzim

Sakkar

Souq

Sybat

List of Arabic Words with all the residents and is familiar with their lineages, members and ownership structures (that is, land and property in the village). Therefore, a Mukhtar plays an important role in governing both the social and spatial relations in a village.

means ‘the organization of something’. In the Syrian context, however, it is colloquially used to refer to a top-down planning process pursued by the government or the municipality. Usually, a Tanzim has negative implications within the Syrian context, as it rarely takes peoples views into consideration.

a verb meaning that somebody has ‘closed’ something. In the Syrian context, this word is often used to describe the process of closing a door, a window, a shop, a water tap or an account. In that sense, and spatially speaking, the word Sakkar does not mean ‘isolate’ or ‘enclose’, but an attempt to ‘gain privacy’ and control access to space. means ‘the shopping area or ‘marketplace’. In contemporary cities, the word can be used in reference to any marketplace. However, it was historically used to refer to certain streets within the old Arab city (Medina) where shopping activities, supplies, craftspeople and traders were found. Therefore, the Souq refers to a very distinctive urban element in the city: usually a long street with different divisions, including jewellery shops, craft shops, carpenters, textile traders and grocery stores.

is a colloquial term that in the Syrian context means a ‘covered passage’. In the architecture of the old city of Homs, for instance, the Sybat refers to a covered passage that usually has a pointed roof from below, allowing commuters to pass through, while connecting two households at the top. It is an architectural element that was extensively used in old cities and villages but is a rare sight in the new parts of cities.

Map of Jordan and Syria y

a L o>

Beirut LEBANON —qpamascus Rural Damascus C Rukban a > . SYRIAN ARAB o j \ \ REPUBLIC i j N Pert i f OAs-Sawara

Al Mafraq

-A Emirati Jordanian Camp (EJC)

Ýr Amman n A Azraq ——

A Refugee camp JORDAN @ Refugee location Refugee settlement ae Capital city a a Vilagos

Armistice demarcation line _ Boundary of former

Source: Author’s own, based on the UNHCR Jordan Situation Map, June 2017

General map of Zaatari camp

Main entrance

~ Mafraq $

NGO car! Check entrance point Registration Base camp

Talal ml | x

TF poses.

Ba: Et. fis}

wo a hee

| Educational facilities

Distribution point Community facilities |Health facilities = Water facilities

Source: Author’s own, based on the UNHCR ‘Zaatari Refugee Camp - Infrastructure and

Facilities Map, May 2019’.

This is not just another book about Zaatari camp or the Syrian refugee crisis. This is also not a text by another Westerner — often a white, male scholar, studying or speaking on behalf of refugees. It is a personal account of how displacement as an individual experience, exile as an intellectual state of being, and a passion for science and discovery all intertwine. Many scholars speak about home and homemaking, increasingly today in the context of refugees and displaced populations. Many Western scholars — some of the most well-known such as Bourdieu, Levi- Strauss and Rapoport — have ethnographically examined the conditions in which communities that are considered different or ‘primitive’ live. Yet how many of these writers have actually endured displacement and can speak about the loss of ‘home’ from personal experience? When is it the time for those who have experienced the loss of home — and by that I particularly mean displaced scholars from the Global South — to narrate their experiences and explain, based on their positionality, what ‘home’ means?

When I left what used to be home in Homs, Syria, I was barely aware of the significance of such a place. Now when I count the places, there were seven that provided shelter for me until I settled in Berlin. After finishing my master’s studies and focusing on my research, I was still little concerned about the need to search for lodgings. For a few nights, I slept on a table in a workroom, stowing my luggage away underneath it and hoping that the cleaner would not notice my presence when she came to the room in the morning. Little did I realise the psychological suffering that the lack of such a space could cause. The frustration of having to finish my research in order to be able to stay in Germany put additional pressure on me. Trips to Zaatari camp in Jordan — which was opened in July 2012, yet emerged as one of the largest refugee camps in the world — enabled me to collect many types of data. On returning to the Technical University Berlin and presenting the work to my colleagues, I was asked, ‘so your research is about homemaking?’ I was surprised. Perhaps the research had become an opportunity for me to subconsciously investigate what I was personally looking for.

At that point, I decided to take ‘homemaking’ as a starting point. ‘Is this what I am experiencing and looking for?’ I asked myself while looking at my desk and the piles of paper covered with sketches gathered from the camp. In Zaatari camp, refugees referred to the structures that they had built and developed out of shelters and other materials as ‘beit’, which in Arabic literally means ‘a house’. In Arabic, there is little difference between what constitutes a home and a house, unlike in the Anglophone tradition. A beit perfectly combines the physical and the emotional at the same time, and it blurs the boundaries between the two. Yet in the Western tradition, a home and a house can have different meanings: a home is more emotional, imaginative and individual, whereas a house is more technical, physical and material.

Looking at the sketches, and reading the literature on home, house, domestic space and so on, my anxiety increased. None of these terms, at least in the way they are shaped and presented in the literature, managed to encompass what I was looking for. Having experienced displacement and the sudden loss of home, I always sensed that I had a better understanding of what refugees go through. There was a point that was absent from the discussion about homing, housing and the domestic situation. A deeper meaning was missing — one that touched on the essence of life; not life as a man-made construct, not life as property, tenure, belonging, identity, memory, emotions, family relations or cultures. Those who lose their home are placed on the threshold of a powerful tension and contradiction. On the one hand, life tells you that you have lost your home or house, but on the other, it says that you still exist — so what can be done about that?

To search for new homes and to construct houses, we first need to dwell

The deep state of loss that refugees experience presents them with a simple question: what can we do? This is not an intellectual question, but one driven by necessity. Yet in the discussion on homing and housing, necessity takes a back seat. We suddenly speak of a right to housing. In that sense, we understand that there is a necessity for it, but that it is often treated as a managerial matter: nation states are obliged to offer their citizens adequate access to housing that fulfils certain conditions (economic, cultural, environmental and psychological). However, in the case of displacement, we are speaking of a bare state of being — a rupture that cuts through all the criteria and features of what adequate housing is and can be. A displaced person is confronted with the most basic state of being on this earth: dwelling.

I still remember the myriad of emotions I experienced while reading the work of Martin Heidegger. There is a poignancy to his texts that stems from similar circumstances and troubled human conditions. At the time he was writing, Germany and Europe were waking up to the aftermath of the Second World War, and millions of people found themselves suddenly homeless. Back then, no one was talking about the right to adequate housing. They recognized the significance of a dwelling: a space that is so common and familiar, similar to the body, that we forget about it only to suddenly remember it at times of war and destruction (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995b).

Indeed, Heidegger’s approach to the ‘problem’ or the notion that I was restlessly searching for in my sketches, as well as in my life, revolves around dwelling. Dwelling is about feeling safe, settled and secure. I was relieved. Heidegger spoke to the bare presence that I experienced, as did many refugees in Zaatari camp. To talk about imagination, belonging, culture, social relations, identity, politics, economics, ethnographies and the anthropologies of housing, homing and the domestic environment is to attempt to examine, and thus explain, a very advanced stage — one that refugees arriving to find a tent may never think of. What happened in Zaatari camp of course includes all of the above. Yet to take homemaking or housing as a starting point — and I am talking academically here, and in relation to the scholarly literature — is akin to attempting to explain a tree solely through one of its leaves.

There is power to the Heideggerian notion of dwelling that is absent in other concepts, such as homemaking, housing and domestic space. By situating the idea of dwelling as an equivalent to being on earth, Heidegger reaches an unprecedented depth — one that transcends crises, emergencies, constructions and deconstructions, cultures and global trends, gentrification and frameworks of production. Dwelling is not a right that needs to be asked for; it is the de facto state of existence in which we experience life on earth. The recurrent process of sleeping, waking up, eating and engaging with life is the present reality in which we all exist, yet it is less acknowledged and sometimes unspoken of. It is this type of fundamental principle that is associated with dwelling; both in concept and in practice. Based on this, in the current book, I speak of dwelling both in terms of a process and a structure. Here, dwelling is referred to interchangeably as the built physical structures for living in, and the process of dwelling as a manifestation of existence. The use of this term reminds us that a dwelling (the sheltering of the physical body) and dwelling (the process, with its spontaneity and complexity) are interlinked subjects. My intention in this regard is not to undermine the importance of more common terms such as housing, the home and the domestic space, but to shed light on the deeper —yet slightly neglected — reality in which we exist; a reality from which we cannot escape, a reality that transcends all emergencies and concepts, and a reality that is immediate and present everywhere, at any given time and for everyone.

In order to search for a home, to construct a house and to experience domestic space, one must first dwell. For displaced communities, for the exiled, and for refugees and migrants, the world constructs an illusionary distinction. People on the move do not dwell. They are deprived of this, since they are unsettled. For them, a shelter is sufficient. It is in our understanding of life that the notion of dwelling vanishes and is replaced with emergency housing or images of the home charged with emotions and intimacy. To experience life, we need both thoughts and emotions — we need the house and the home. Yet even before that, we need to be present. We need to dwell. The depth of this notion is indispensable in the context of displacement.

In the Theoretical Overview, I delve deeper into this conceptual discussion by explaining how the house, the home and the domestic space are all interlinked, but slightly distinctive dimensions of dwelling. While this could constitute a research project in itself, worthy of its own book, I will attempt to clarify the main concepts and ideas encapsulated by each of these terms. Perhaps controversially, I show that the production, shaping and representation of these key terms — home, house and domestic space — are arguably little more than scholarly constructs, with traceable limits stemming from the different ways in which various academic disciplines have approached the phenomenon of dwelling. In that sense, dwelling is the beating heart that unites all these definitions and brings them back to their starting point. For this reason, the chapter includes a more in-depth exploration of the notion of dwelling in Heidegger’s thoughts. What are the main characteristics of dwelling as a phenomenon and as a process? Here, and in addition to a semiotic reading of the term both in German and Arabic, I stress the importance of creativity and resistance in dwelling. Both concepts appear subtly in Heidegger’s less commonly read text Poetically Man Dwells, which formed a basis for Lefebvre to build his conceptual distinction between ‘inhabiting’ and ‘habitat’. For him, the ‘habitat’ is a ‘concept or rather a caricatural pseudo-concept’ that breaks down the spontaneity and complexity of human being into a ‘handful of basic acts: eating, sleeping, and re-producing’ (Lefebvre 2003, 81). Thus, during the nineteenth century, the use of ‘habitat’ aimed to eclipse the ‘inhabiting’ that is closer to Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling.

This contemporary reading of dwelling as a situated practice between top-down ideologies and bottom-up appropriations is a common thread that ties this whole book together. While these concepts will be further discussed in the conclusion, the first chapter gives an extensive overview of current debates, and explains why dwelling, both as a process and a product, is used in this book.

1 In the English translation of The Urban Revolution, ‘inhabiting’ is translated from French as ‘habiting’. However, in the current book | use ‘habiting’, but also ‘inhabiting’, as being more familiar to English readers.

The dilemma of shelters

Displaced people face an immediate and little-mentioned challenge: how do they dwell, now that they have been deprived of their home and thus, their original dwelling space? Refugees seek accommodation in cities, informal areas, villages and camps. They utilize their social networks to find lodgings, when and wherever possible. Families share flats in cities, settle in neighbourhoods, occupy vacant buildings, construct makeshift housing on leased land or are accommodated in shelters provided by relief organizations in camps. The term ‘shelter’ can in fact be relatively broad and can include a variety of spaces and structures (see for instance Scott-Smith and Breeze 2020). It can, for instance, refer not only to tents and prefabricated buildings offered to refugees, but also to housing provided by the state for homeless people in need, or even to flats offered to refugees by relief actors in cities. However, a shelter always encompasses a sense of loss and emergency. Both notions are important to address here. Loss is intrinsically associated with displacement. To be displaced is to be uprooted, and therefore, no longer settled. In Arabic, the word for dwelling, Sakana, implies staying in place. To be on the move, thus hypothetically suggests the absence of dwelling. Displaced people are not settled and are accordingly seen as non-dwellers. When the notion of dwelling — in all its complexity — is in decline, it can be easily replaced with an empty room; a roof with four walls. After all, the purpose of shelter is ‘protection’ (see Scott-Smith and Breeze 2020).

The need to protect brings us to the second point, which is emergency. It is unlikely that someone would choose to live in a shelter. The notion of shelter signifies a state of emergency and exception. In that sense, shelters are architectonic responses to emergencies. For instance, shelters are usually offered in the context of natural crises, such as floods and earthquakes; in the context of war and the destruction of cities for IDPs; in spaces that experience a sudden rush of incoming populations, such as construction sites and neighbourhoods settled by migrants and the working classes; and of course, in refugee camps. In that sense, a shelter is always situated between an emergency need for a dwelling space and the lack thereof. Between loss and emergency, the shelter becomes a space of temporariness, a space where the body is protected, but dwelling is suspended. Yet if dwelling is an inevitable manifestation of being, then what happens to the shelter? What kind of relationships emerge between the dwelling and the shelter? In other words, how do refugees manage to dwell within a space that has been designed with no consideration given to social relations, culture, identity, socioeconomics, gender, history, time, intimacy and sex? How can such ‘abstract spaces’, as Lefebvre would call them, be transformed as dwelling occurs in them? These are some of the core questions addressed in this book.

The refugee camp as a disciplinary machine

Discipline is one of the most expected, yet least explored, notions in the context of refugee camps. Studies into camps are usually interested in topics such as exceptionality and ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), the camp-city (Agier 2002), the ambivalence of the camp (Martin 2015; Oesch 2017) or refugees’ agency (Sanyal 2010; Ramadan 2013). Little research is dedicated to uncovering the camp as the machinery of discipline. In this book, I focus on unravelling the ways in which the shelter is situated within a network of power relations that are disciplinary at their core. In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1979) explains the characteristics of the disciplinary space: the use of a ‘cellular unit’ to design and organize the space around it, the attempt to organize these units across space so they can be observed and the people within them can be managed, the introduction of hierarchies and rankings into the space so it is well divided and easily observed by those who govern the space, and lastly, the attention paid to the human body as the focus of these disciplinary practices. All these strategies for managing the space of a camp are implemented through planning. In this process, the shelter plays an important role. Not only does it become the ‘cellular unit’ around which the camp is planned, but it also plays a role in enforcing discipline on refugees. It is widely known that shelters are standardized units hosting refugee families distributed across the surface of the camp. However, little is known about how they are woven as part of a camp's disciplinary machinery.

A shelter becomes a part of this disciplinary machinery through the ability to organize bodies in space. Picture this: in a camp, refugees are brought together from different locations, backgrounds and family structures. In addition to single travellers, there are extended families, often with complex and dynamic relations. Inacamp, the shelter is moreover usually a single space, substituting for both living and sleeping areas. It is rarely composed of many spaces, and often does not include separate facilities for functions such as bathing and cooking. When looking at a planned camp, one may imagine how the spatial structures attempt to reorganize the human body: families with different family structures all squeezed into a single space, and areas planned as residential zones, with communal kitchens and toilets placed in different areas. What used to be one composition — the dwelling — is now scattered across the camp in multiple measurable and standardized units. The shelter, which can be seen as ‘too material, too banal, too small-scale and technical’ (Scott-Smith 2020, 4), is entangled in a web of power relations that produce and reproduce discipline and control in the camp. In Chapter 1, I show how the camp and the shelter are intertwined. In particular, I show how spatial relations and arrangements, introduced into the camp as ‘planning’, have the ability to produce a disciplinary space. To understand the camp and the shelter as interconnected and intertwined spaces, and to situate the shelter within the camp machinery are highly important considerations. This is because such an understanding allows us to perceive the transition from shelters to dwellings, which this book is concerned with; not as a small-scale appropriation limited to the boundaries of the shelter, but as a multi-scalar process that has the ability to transform the camp as a whole. Dwelling — which was initially repressed within the shelter design and camp planning — begins to induce change. It fractures the machinery of the camp and the shelter, dismantles its enforcement and uses its fragments to construct dwellings. This process I refer to as dismantling and reassembling the camp.

Dismantling and reassembling

Dismantling and reassembling is an emerging concept that seeks to theorize the relationship between the dwelling and the camp. It starts from the fact that there is no camp without dwelling. Every camp, no matter how temporary, constitutes a sort of residence; a dwelling space. Regardless of how planned it is, each camp also resembles an alienation from dwelling, and a repression of the dwelling space. The camp and the dwelling are entrapped in cycles of contradictions, with each wanting to vanquish the other. The camp wants to remain temporary, manageable and a sign of emergency, whereas the dwelling wants to be permanent, and a sign of settlement, stillness and presence. This initially conflictual relationship starts to fade away as the need for dwelling prevails over any other imposed logic or considerations. The camp starts to disappear, and dwellings start to emerge. To face the domination of the camp, the force of the dwelling begins to crack up its fortification, to break it down into pieces and separate it into elements. Breaking down the camp into its elements, both physically and metaphorically, is the process of dismantling. By dismantling the camp, refugees — whose need for dwelling is imperative, overlooked or reduced to ‘shelter’ — begin to put back together the elements extracted from the camp. In other words, the camp as a politico-spatial vision, materialized as an apparatus of discipline, is broken down into pieces, and these pieces are put back together to produce dwellings. Thus, dwellings are reassembled from the camp and its dismantled parts. In this process, refugees — the dwellers, become the architects; the masters of the space. They mediate between the different needs, the potential and the limitations arising from two worlds: the social and the material.

In Chapter 1, I look closely at the process of dismantling, which as a practice, can be directly linked to the (planned) construction of refugee camps as the machinery for survival. This is why it may be less visible in spontaneous camps that are built by refugees. In planned camps, however, dwelling is meant to be suspended, and refugees are turned into manageable objects within its disciplinary space. Under such conditions, dwelling begins by taking apart the enforcement capacities of the camp. This process is tied to the level of control exercised by those who govern the camp to maintain its order and structure, and therefore differs in its intensity. In some cases, such as the one presented in this book, dismantling the camp can be a comprehensive process that spans various dimensions including the spatial organization of shelter, communal infrastructures, the shelters themselves, and the economy. All these elements, once dismantled, are reintegrated within the dwelling space. The result is a hybrid assemblage that is neither fully a camp, a shelter nor a dwelling, but something in between. These practices of reassembling are explored in two parts: the first is dedicated to exploring the dynamics of the social world, and the second to examining the dynamics induced by the material world.