Introduction for Fragments of Home

INTRODUCTION

Houses are killed just like their inhabitants. And the memory of objects is killed: stone, wood, glass, iron, cement are scattered in broken fragments like living beings. . . . Photographs, toothbrushes, combs, cosmetics, shoes, underwear, sheets, towels fly in every direction like family secrets broadcast aloud in the devastation.

—Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst

THE JUNGLE STOOD ON A large patch of sandy wasteland at the edge of Calais, bounded to the east by a country lane and to the west by a highway that led to the port. To the north lay a vast, open beach where one could look out over the waters of the English Channel to the cliffs of Britain—a place that many of its residents aspired to live. Along the beach stood the turrets of factories and a wide arc of warehouse roofs jutting up from an industrial park. In the other direction, the urban skyscape dissolved into a coastal nature reserve and a shoreline punctuated by decaying artillery batteries from World War II. These enormous concrete structures had crumbled slowly over many years, revealing rusted iron skeletons and cavernous, rain-stained interiors.

The Jungle was created here in early 2015 when refugees started to sleep in the area while trying to get to England. They erected small tents under scraggly bushes and threw plastic sheeting over the branches of small trees. During the day, they slept among patches of woodland, and in the long nights, they tried to board lorries heading to the ferry port. Such camps had long been a feature of Calais, and the name “jungle” was often used to describe them. It is a term thought to derive from the Pashto dzhangal, meaning “forest,” indicating life in wooded areas, hidden from sight of the police.¹ These settlements had been dotted around the city since at least the 1980s, but the Jungle of 2015 was different in both scale and visibility. It was created after the local police began forcibly clearing the many smaller camps in Calais, tolerating their presence only in the tufty land at the east of the city. A new jungle emerged here over the next few months, which became larger than all the other settlements put together.²

At first, there were just a few hundred people living in tents spread over the sand and grass, but soon the camp grew and attracted more people. As the migrations of 2015–2016 gathered pace, the first few makeshift homes were given solid foundations: pallets lain on the muddy ground and wooden frames built around them. These were then wrapped in taut tarpaulin with tires thrown on top to weigh down the roofs. By 2016, there were thousands of people living in such houses, mostly constructed from wood and plastic sheeting. Some migrants opened shops from the front of their shelters, selling basic food and supplies. Others built places of worship, such as a large Orthodox church that was topped by a wooden cross.³ There were schools and libraries covered in huge sheets of white canvas. Restaurants were also built next to ponds, providing food on carpeted decks wedged by the water’s edge.

When I began visiting the Jungle in the middle of 2016, it was already clear that this informal settlement had become an important place of shelter. It was materially fragile and often squalid, but people nevertheless managed to find many forms of assistance in its temporary streets.⁴ Its flimsy buildings were bathed in mud throughout the winter, and by spring, they were saturated with moisture, yet the settlement offered something crucial to its inhabitants: networks of social support. You could sit on the battered sofas of refugee-owned cafes and meet legal activists helping with asylum claims. You could reminisce about long journeys and learn about onward routes. You could drink tea with local artists and borrow books from the camp library. It was not all self-help either; there were many forms of humanitarianism on display. Volunteers traveled from Britain with donated clothing. French citizens helped to nail planks of timber into framework houses. An international medical charity set up clinics in a mobile caravan. Theater groups came to provide entertainment. Teachers worked in a temporary school.⁵

FIGURE 0.1. Temporary shelters in the Camp de la Lande. Calais, France. © University of Oxford / Mark E. Breeze, 2016.

The most striking humanitarian project, however, was a formal section of the camp that had been made from converted shipping containers.⁶ This was constructed adjacent to the original jungle, surrounded by a fence and placed on level ground. Unlike other initiatives, it was a professional intervention with government backing: the containers were fixed in a grid and stacked on top of each another. In order to enter the compound, you had to register and pass through a turnstile, which checked handprints against a database. The main part of the Jungle was open and unplanned, but the container camp was closed and controlled. The rest of the Jungle was vibrant, but the container camp appeared in a series of washed-out colors. Whereas the Jungle was free and chaotic, the container camp was restricted and calm. Whereas the Jungle featured winding alleys over undulating ground, the container camp was built on soil that had been flattened and squared. This “camp within a camp” had been designed to house 1,500 people in clean and sanitary conditions. The contrast between spaces was remarkable.

To live in the container camp, you had to sign up to a long list of rules and restrictions that concerned visiting hours, curfews, and cooking. These were meant to address the perceived disorder of the Jungle, but the result was a settlement without any community. To avoid the cumbersome process of entry and exit, it was common for residents to climb over the perimeter fence to get into the rest of the Jungle, where they could buy food in the shops, meet friends for coffee, and worship in the mosques.⁷ Once over the barrier, they could even walk over to an old walled summer camp nearby, where a French organization offered free meals in cardboard trays.⁸

The two parts of the Jungle contained different ideas of what shelter involved. One was order and hygiene, while the other was spontaneous community. Together, they turned the Jungle into an important stop-off point for migrants—a place where people could rest, regroup, and find assistance.

As the settlement continued to grow, its residents soon found themselves in conflict with the police. This took place most spectacularly along the highway to the west of the camp, where migrants spent the nights trying to smuggle themselves onto lorries bound for the ferry port. The best way to do this was to create what they called a dougar, a blockage or “mess,” which forced trucks to slow down. The police tried to prevent people from breaking into lorries by fortifying the road and surrounding the camp, clearing a buffer zone along the road, and firing rubber bullets to drive people back. Yet the residents of the jungle kept finding ingenious methods to get around police lines. The operations intensified, and by the spring of 2016, the authorities had decided to clear the entire southern section of the camp, leaving smoke-filled skies and crackling wood. The network of fences between camp and city was extended, and migrants were forced into an ever-smaller patch of land in the north.

FIGURE 0.2. Shipping containers in the Centre d’Accueil Provisoire. Calais, France. © University of Oxford / Mark E. Breeze, 2016.

By the autumn of 2016, the government had decided to destroy what was left of the camp. The dismantling began at the crack of dawn in late October. Long lines of people waited with their coats and suitcases to board buses that would take them to new Reception and Orientation Centers (Centres d’accueil et d’orientation) around France.⁹ Others resisted the clearance, starting fires that ripped through the tents and trailers, which worsened over the next few days as gas canisters exploded and flames licked the evening sky. By the third day, lines of armed police were pushing through the camp to clear any remaining people, and workmen followed in their wake, tearing each shelter down and stripping timber from wooden frames, pulling nails from plastic sheeting, and shredding canvas into pieces. Smoke started staining the clouds, and an eerie orange glow settled over the ruins of the Jungle. Soon, nothing was left except fragments in the sand.¹⁰

I visited the Jungle for the last time a few weeks after these fires had been extinguished, and by then, the shelters were lying in pieces. The dunes still rolled down to the ocean, and the industrial edges of Calais still crumbled into the countryside around, but the land around me was devastated. Scraps of discarded plastic blew past in a breeze. Bulldozers churned up the last of the shelters to bury what was left. Linoleum and wood lay where homes once stood, and toothbrushes and knives lay wedged in the sand around them. The items on the ground testified to hurried departures, sprinkled with the light frost of an early winter’s day. It was difficult not to be moved by these fragments of former homes, their decay and disposability a reminder of the people who had once lived there. They evoked Mahmoud Darwish’s poem about how buildings can be killed, their contents buried like secrets amid the devastation.¹¹

FOUNDATIONS

I first became interested in humanitarian shelter when working on a related project about nutrition. It was the middle of 2012, and I had been studying how humanitarians provide for basic needs in new emergencies. One day, I was watching a group of camp planners from the United Nations sketch out a new settlement in the Jordanian desert, which later became known as Zaʾatari.¹² It was a blisteringly hot day, and I introduced myself while they were taking shade under a hastily erected tarpaulin. As we talked, one of the planners crouched down and began to unfurl a map on the ground, explaining how the camp was projected to grow over the next three years. Hundreds of refugees kept arriving every hour, disembarking from the back of buses onto a sandy patch of land, and I was told how they would be allocated a small plot for shelter, initially filled with a tent but later with more semipermanent structures. I was shown the design for these structures. It looked like a shipping container but with small windows and laminate floors, set out in lines and craned into neighborhoods.

Over the next few days, I shadowed the team as they marked out paths, plots, and water points. I watched as they worked with a bewildering array of standards, which shaped every element of the camp. Each dwelling met a minimum floor area per person. Standpipes were provided to a certain quality and flow. Streets had to be laid out to fixed proportions, and there were metrics that determined everything from the material in the walls to the equipment in the schools. It was an approach that suggested human needs could be standardized and controlled, an idea that reduced the issue of shelter to an engineering challenge to be solved with wires, walls, and steel. It would be several years before I had the chance to study the topic in more detail, but I knew there was more to shelter than this. Nevertheless, that day, I started collecting different examples of refugee shelter while reflecting on what worked and what didn’t. I became particularly interested in the tension between universal human needs and specific cultural particularities.

When the “long summer of migration” arrived in 2015, I started to examine shelter in more depth.¹³ The story began that year on April 18, 2015, when over six hundred migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁴ This was a horrific event that awoke many policymakers to the scale of global displacement and launched a long-running media story that shifted attention as the months went by. After beginning in the central Mediterranean, news reports soon focused on the “Balkan route,” where thousands of dinghies began to land on the shores of Greek islands. At the start of September, the body of toddler Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, and his photograph flashed around the world. Informal settlements like the Jungle began to grow, and soon Angela Merkel was leading a short-lived “welcome culture” in Germany. Shelter became an imperative for many states.¹⁵

I launched this project when media narratives remained exhaustingly negative, but there was still something positive beneath the surface—a story of remarkable people seeking a better life and others trying to assist them. It had become clear that refugees were staying in a troubling variety of places: some lived for months in ruined buildings, others slept on the floors of friends and relatives, and many had to rest under trees at the side of the road. Camps emerged over that summer in a disorienting variety of forms, and refugees also ended up sleeping in reception centers or detained against their will. The 2015 summer of migration above all showed how shelter could mean different things to different people. For some, it meant protection in a functioning nation-state. For others, it meant protection from the elements in its most basic form. In many cases, it meant securing one’s own private apartment, ideally supported by aid agencies. Within each location, there were a wide variety of shelters, and even in that small area of Calais, one could find both a vibrant informal settlement and the linear modernism of a container camp nearby.

This all contributed to the remarkable uptick of interest among architects and designers as the year went on. By December, the design press had started to fill up with new proposals for refugee shelters. Many of these took the form of supposedly universal dwellings, which aspired to be compact, simple, and cheap. I was initially skeptical about these innovative ideas as they seemed driven more by novelty than by wisdom.¹⁶ They included pop-up shelters that could be dropped from an aircraft, tents that transformed into clothing, and homes that could be packed down onto a flatbed truck.¹⁷ As I looked more into the issue of shelter, however, I began to reassess my view. It seemed inappropriate to be too dismissive of new ideas when so many people needed a roof over their heads in such a short time. Before long, I developed a series of research questions that reflected my interest in the tensions of emergency shelter and the difficulties of definition. First, there was a descriptive question: How were refugees being accommodated in different countries after 2015? Second, there was an evaluative question: What was working, what was failing, and why? Third, there was a practical question: What was the role for architecture and design? I also developed a fourth, and more philosophical, question: What is shelter in the end? How can we define this basic human need?

CORNERSTONES

I began fieldwork in the spring of 2016, when the urgency of the summer of migration had faded away but examples of emergency shelter remained thick on the ground. The media were still focusing on the spectacular chaos of informal settlements like the Calais Jungle, so I first traveled to France, where I found many forms of humanitarian relief: professional and amateur, formal and informal, planned and unplanned. I traveled next to Germany, where I began to follow the fate of more unusual renovations of sites that were rich in history. This included Tempelhof Airport in Berlin—a huge Nazi-era building that had been repurposed as a massive shelter. I soon settled on seven examples to demonstrate the variety of approaches to this basic human need. My final list of cases to study included two mega refugee camps in Jordan, an archipelago of rented accommodation in Lebanon, a vibrant squatting movement in Greece, and some expansive and symbolic interventions in France.

From the start, I was motivated by the notion that there is not one approach to shelter but a whole spectrum of ideas, so I set out to speak to the people who designed and built different structures in order to understand what motivated them and how they defined the problem. It was already clear that many people became involved in providing shelter to refugees over the course of that summer. Sometimes, it was an act of self-help, as when refugees walking through the Balkans erected tents in the bushes. Sometimes, it was an act of pragmatic adaptation, as when engineers converted empty warehouses and department stores in Berlin. Sometimes, it was a fundamentally political act, as when activists worked alongside refugees to occupy buildings in Athens. At other moments, it involved architects constructing buildings from scratch or industrial designers coming up with mass-produced universal dwellings.

These efforts involved the work of many people: architects, engineers, civil servants, solidarity activists, professional shelter specialists, and, of course, refugees themselves. This book touches on many of them, but it approaches the topic through the prism of humanitarianism. I use this word in the broadest sense to describe the work of people trying to meet the basic human needs of others in emergency conditions. My approach takes its lead from recent ethnographies of the relief industry—such as Liisa Malkki’s study of Finnish Red Cross workers and Peter Redfield’s study of Médecins Sans Frontières—which uncover what humanitarianism means to different people.¹⁸ In this book, I recount seven detailed examples of emergency shelter, which collectively represent something of the diversity in humanitarian responses that emerged in this period. As I conducted the research, I always posed three basic questions to my interlocutors. First, how did they conceive of “shelter”? Second, what shelters did they think were particularly successful? And third, what might these examples teach us about the nature of basic human needs?

These questions gave a new twist to an old topic. Shelter has long been a staple of anthropological inquiry, an element of human life that is striking in its diversity but rooted in a common experience. For many decades, anthropologists examined how shelter is shaped by social contexts, how it illuminates values and norms, how it can be a vernacular adaptation to local conditions.¹⁹ In a humanitarian context, too, some new tensions emerge. In trying to universalize the issue, aid workers usually want to define a bottom line; they attempt to create common standards for shelter. They look to produce cheap designs that can be used in a variety of conditions, and they try to act quickly. Such tensions—between the specific and the universal, the short and the long term, the balance of quality and cost—help to shed light on the dynamics of the aid world as well as the nature of human shelter.

My methods in this research were qualitative and ethnographic but always driven by the idea that ethnography is best built on diverse foundations.²⁰ Long-term participant observation was infeasible given problems of access and the number of projects involved, so I relied on in-depth interviews, photography, and film. Although “being there” was certainly crucial to my research—not least because one can never really understand a space of shelter without experiencing its sounds, smells, and sightlines—my access was often limited by visiting hours and concerns about privacy.²¹ Participant observation could only be undertaken in limited, guided, and carefully managed conditions, so the backbone of this book was consequently built on detailed conversations with aid workers, architects, designers, donors, and others involved in providing shelter to refugees. These humanitarians, loosely defined, constituted the community I was trying to understand. My interest was in following how these people framed the world around them, the way they understood the need for shelter and acted to provide it in constrained conditions. Such conversations were supplemented by extended site visits and detailed documentation of shelters through photographs and architectural plans, which I collected over a three-year period from 2016 to 2019.²²

BRICKWORK

As we can see from the brief description of the Jungle that opened this chapter, shelter has many elements. It can be a social practice as well as a material practice. It has a soft side as well as a hard side. It exists in buildings but also in human relationships. How, therefore, can we define basic shelter? This was one of the central questions that motivated my research from the start.

The essence of shelter seems, at first glance, to be rather obvious. Shelter is widely recognized as one of our most fundamental human needs, placed at the base of Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy.²³ It has something to do with protection, defense against the elements through a roof or covering, yet it easily bursts from these confines while pushing outward toward greater complexity of form. To illustrate this, consider the silver-and-gold space blanket, which was a common sight in media reports during the 2015 summer of migration. Crinkling gently in microphones and glinting powerfully in the sun, these blankets were often distributed during maritime rescue missions to wrap around wet, shivering bodies and provide a thin layer of immediate protection. They are perhaps the most elementary form of shelter but are only ever useful for a few hours.²⁴

When we try to define “shelter” at the most basic level like this, it immediately wriggles and jumps from our hands. It is clear that basic shelter has to involve something more than a blanket, but where does it start and end? Consider next a simple structure that provides a roof or covering. This might come in the form of canvas, a sheet of corrugated metal, or the protecting branch of a tree. Many migrants in Europe found this kind of shelter while walking on foot along the “Balkan route” from Greece to Germany, especially when hiding from the authorities. Some humanitarians assisted these journeys by providing migrants with tents or tarpaulin, by renting abandoned warehouses, or by converting empty buildings into dormitories. The conditions in such shelters were rudimentary and often insanitary. In many cases, people were crammed into small spaces, living under bare roofs in damp conditions. Again, we face a problem if we see this as the essence of basic shelter. Such structures can provide some respite from the rain, and they might prevent death from exposure, but the protection they offer is minimal and hardly sufficient.

Let us turn next to more complete prefabricated structures. Shelters in this category include the converted shipping containers in camps like Zaʾatari or mass-produced flat-pack shelters, such as those funded by the IKEA Foundation (considered in the next chapter). Such designs certainly improve on a warehouse or tent. They offer a private space, a lockable door, and a degree of privacy. They adhere to the widespread humanitarian standard that stipulates a covered floor area of at least 3.5 square meters per person—a metric that has been accepted for many years and is meant to prevent people from sleeping in overcrowded spaces like caged animals.²⁵ It is the closest thing we can find to a common definition of “basic shelter,” but for most people, it is still too limiting. A shelter might meet the minimum floor area, but it could still lack insulation, a space to cook, properly sealed rooms, airflow, and other aspects that we consider essential for a decent standard of living.

The idea of “health” is often introduced at this point to define a minimum requirement for shelter. Indeed, a well-known definition sees “shelter” as “a habitable living space providing a secure, healthy living environment with privacy and dignity.”²⁶ This draws our attention to another layer of shelter—specifically, the way that shelter should offer far more than four walls and a roof if it is to prevent human suffering. At the very least, a shelter needs to protect against extremes of temperature. It needs to provide enough comfort for proper rest. It needs to include a separate place to sleep and cook. It needs to provide sanitation and a place to wash. Another requirement for shelter may be access to energy and running water. Each of these features can be grounded in health, which leads to other elements that could demand inclusion too. Perhaps a basic shelter needs to include a chimney or flue to remove toxic smoke. Perhaps it needs glass in the windows to keep in warmth. Perhaps it needs properly sealed doors to block rodents from entering or access to washing facilities to prevent gastrointestinal illness. These may all be crucial to stay healthy, and they lead us to define basic shelter in a more expansive manner—pointing to something bigger, more solidly built, with a number of rooms and spaces.

Is this still basic? Does it extend beyond the requirements of an emergency? For some humanitarians, the emphasis on health is still not enough because it fails to fulfill our need for social life. After all, basic shelter surely has to do more than just promote good physical health if it is to prevent human suffering. What use is excellent health if you’re trapped in a remote area in the middle of the desert with no one else around? One document from the United Nations clarifies that basic shelter should provide more than just “protection from the elements” and “access to clean water” but also “secure tenure,” “personal safety,” and “proximity to places of employment and educational and health care facilities.”²⁷ This takes us into a new realm with an emphasis on economic and social life, which is particularly important in contexts of forced migration. The result is an idea of shelter that fills new horizons. It is not just about a roof, privacy, and health but also about connecting people to “livelihood opportunities” and “essential community services.” It means thinking about shelter in terms of education, employment, and transport.²⁸

Where does shelter go next? After pushing beyond health and physical needs to embrace social and economic requirements, shelter must finally reckon with our cultural and creative lives. A good illustration of the failure in this regard can be seen in those soulless refugee camps that offer long lines of identical shelters but very little life. Such places might offer physical protection (and even access to good quality services), but they can do nothing for human flourishing. Resembling rabbit hutches, they fail to recognize the importance of art, culture, and aesthetics to human life. They may, at first glance, appear to lie beyond the realm of the “basic,” but there is growing evidence that protracted exile in monotonous refugee camps has an appalling effect on mental health.²⁹

Some humanitarians have addressed this by insisting that refugees should get involved in building their own shelter, while others have reached for the well-known adage that shelter is “a process not a product.”³⁰ This draws our attention to the question of how shelter is provided, not simply what is provided. It underlines the idea that the inhabitants of a shelter need to be actively involved in defining what matters to them—a theme that will recur often in this book. In the extensive literature about architecture and humanism, many writers have also suggested that shelters should help fulfill one’s ideals of a better life. Gaston Bachelard, for example, describes the house as a place to nurture the imagination, a place that “shelters day-dreaming” as well as the body.³¹ Marina Warner writes of how shelters need to contain a range of imaginative equipment, becoming places “where fantasy and invention, memories and improvisation can happen.”³² It may seem like a long journey from the crinkling of a space blanket to the most expansive of human aspirations, but the various strands of shelter are embroidered into a complex fabric, which are hard to disentangle in practice.

SEVEN FRAGMENTS OF SHELTER

In this book, I look ethnographically at how humanitarians respond to such complexity, how they define the need for shelter, and take urgent action. In what follows, I build an account of what shelter does and how it is thought about in seven detailed examples. The study shows that shelter has many elements. It involves dignity, control, aesthetics, social connections, politics, solidarity, and harm. Humanitarian practitioners may not want their work to be about all these things when they engage in the provision of shelter, but every one of them is important. The chapters each consider a project that focuses on a particular aspect, defining the central task of shelter in a way that is summarized via a single word in the chapter title. These projects show how any attempt to pin down the meaning of “basic shelter” will end up in fragments. Humanitarians may try their best to define the central issue, to boil things down to their essence, to design something with the perfect balance, but the results are profoundly disjointed. The alternative, I suggest in the conclusion, is to prioritize the principle of autonomy, which can allow refugees to define what matters themselves.

In chapter 1, I begin with a design from Sweden that arrived in two boxes. This was funded by the IKEA Foundation, and it claimed to capture the essence of shelter in a single structure, which could be dismantled into hundreds of parts, flat packed, and then reconstructed in the wake of disaster. This gets to the heart of shelter as a humanitarian problem. How did these designers define the essential elements of shelter? What did they exclude and include? And what was the result? The chapter shows how the idea of a universal flat-pack shelter tried to boil things down to the basics, to break shelter down into little parts that could be reassembled where needed, but the result became contentious. Some people accused the shelter of being too luxurious; others criticized it for being too mean. Many aid workers claimed that the shelter was overdesigned and unsustainable since it involved sending packets of prefabricated plastic overseas rather than using local materials. Some architects, in contrast, said that the problem was a lack of good design, comparing the shelter to a portable toilet. These disputes introduce the central problem of precision, which followed the shelter as it was deployed around the world. Some countries blocked the shelter on the grounds that it offered conditions that were better than those of citizens. Others condemned it for being culturally inappropriate and a fire risk. The example shows how shelter is always contextual, and, as well as illustrating the difficulties of defining basic shelter, it highlights the tendency of aid workers to impose culturally specific ideas onto people from very different backgrounds.

The second chapter turns to Jordan, where two enormous refugee camps were created in the desert. Here, the planners tried to provide everything refugees might need, from supermarkets to schools, piped water to paved roads. It was a model that went beyond the minimum four walls and a roof to provide all the services of a small town, which raised various questions about the proper scope of this sector. Should humanitarians work with a comprehensive checklist of everything required from a shelter? Might such detailed metrics miss something important? In these camps, the huts stretched out in monotonous gray uniformity. Each house was identical to the next, and there was no variation or color. Refugees were not permitted to alter their shelters, and they could not create a place that felt like home—they were even forbidden from planting vegetation to improve the surrounding environment. The chapter shows how even the broadest definitions of “shelter” can miss something crucial about the nature of human needs. It demonstrates how the value of shelter can be found not in a list of metrics to be counted and met but in what shelter allows one to do.

Chapter 3 examines a radical alternative to the refugee camp, which was founded in downtown Athens. Here, a group of activists occupied a hotel that had been empty since the 2008 financial crash, creating a self-governing community for refugees. It is an example that raises important questions about the relationship between shelter and politics. Is shelter always implicated in structures of power and control? Can refugee shelters ever be apolitical? Or might people, conversely, be bound to realize political objectives through shelter? The activists in Athens criticized other approaches that claimed to stand outside politics while remaining controlling and hierarchical. As an alternative, they developed a form of housing underpinned by the values of equality and community. They asked that all residents participated in the daily running of the hotel, taking on chores from cooking to cleaning, and they ran general assemblies to make all the important decisions. It was an inspiring idea, but it still had critics. Some argued that squatted buildings could never provide shelter at scale. Others suggested that the approach simply reproduced hierarchies rather than doing away with them. Many people condemned the squat for its close connection to radical anarchist movements. The activists saw this as a good thing—as an attempt to deal with the root causes of refugee needs—but critics wondered whether people should have to sign up for the destruction of nation-states in order to get a bed for the night. Through following the fate of this scheme, the chapter explores the distinction between a communal vision of shelter and one that facilitates people’s individual, longer-term aims.

Chapter 4 turns to Lebanon, which hosted more refugees per capita than anywhere else in the world. This generated a context in which many citizens feared permanent settlement, and the result was a limited range of options. Camps were forbidden, and forced migrants ended up living in an assortment of inadequate and improvised buildings scattered across the country, which raised crucial questions about the relationship between protection and policy. What happens when governments prohibit the creation of emergency shelters? How can humanitarians adapt in the face of such restrictions? Many refugees were left living in terrible conditions: in old factories, chicken farms, warehouses, and empty shopping malls. They were forced to squeeze into the gaps, finding a place to sleep where they could, while aid workers found their hands tied. Unable to construct new shelters, they set about providing piecemeal improvements to the inadequate accommodation refugees had found. The result was a situation whereby humanitarians followed the decisions of refugees but without being able to transform their circumstances. The chapter describes this as an instance of shelter by tactics and concludes that humanitarian shelter must be led by a clear strategic vision; otherwise, it will end up subservient to the interests of more powerful actors.

Chapter 5 turns to Germany, where the idea of transforming old buildings into refugee shelters became central to the strategies of government. Many iconic buildings in Germany were requisitioned for this purpose, including the former Stasi headquarters in Lichtenberg, the buildings of Dachau concentration camp, and the enormous Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Focusing particularly on the empty airport, this chapter raises crucial questions about adaptation and renewal in the search for basic shelter. Does basic shelter have to involve constructing something new? Or is it better to adapt what we have, giving buildings new life? At Tempelhof, thousands of asylum seekers found shelter in a building that was originally designed by Nazi architects in the 1930s. Vast, empty aircraft hangars were repurposed, shower blocks installed, and refugees slept in bunk beds separated by thin dividing walls. The use of such buildings was symbolically risky, but it represented a pragmatic approach to shelter that was driven not by ideal conditions but by the need to avoid refugees living on the street. It was a system that provided basic shelter but in a way that restricted inhabitants through a voluminous list of rules and regulations. Drawing on this example, the chapter shows how paternalism emerges in shelter, imposing serious costs on inhabitants.

Chapter 6 considers a creative approach to mass shelter that emerged in Vienna. The city was dealing with a large number of refugee arrivals, and the local authorities, desperate for space, adapted empty office blocks to provide emergency housing. Such buildings were deeply unsuitable, but they were modified with an eye to the emotional quality of internal space. This generated important questions about the relationship between shelter and the senses. Are emotions important in the provision of shelter? Should humanitarians consider how places make people feel? Rather than concentrating on ambitious structural alterations, the architects in this project focused on modest changes to allocated buildings with small objects and items of furniture. They used blankets to absorb sound, cushions to add comfort, and nylon curtains to provide privacy and controllable lighting. Drawing on the work of Bachelard, the designers argued that basic shelter could involve a “poetics of space”—an awareness of how buildings make people feel. Critics argued that this was hopelessly idealistic, but the architects suggested, in response, that the experience of a building is crucial to its function. The chapter concludes that the cumulative effect of small hardships can be easy to ignore in shelter but that this can be addressed through design that promotes autonomy in small but significant ways.

The final chapter examines a striking refugee shelter in Paris, which took the form of a taut, inflatable bubble of bright-yellow plastic. This was erected in a decaying railway yard in the northern fringes of the city and was visible for miles around, rising over the tarmac of the abandoned industrial site and extending over eight hundred square meters. It was a fascinating and creative example of shelter that raised some fundamental questions about the relationship between humanitarianism and aesthetics. Does beauty have a role in basic shelter? If so, what part should good design play in humanitarian emergencies? In the case of the so-called Yellow Bubble, the mayor wanted a shelter that could become “a signpost of humanity,” an emblem of compassionate intent, but the architecture was symbolic rather than practical, and it contributed little to the experience of refugees inside. Most importantly, the optimistic symbolism of the bubble took on a different hue when the shelter became part of a project to sort migrants for deportation. It began to look like the striking design was used to make a place of misery look more attractive. The chapter concludes that aesthetics is important to emergency shelter, but it can easily become entangled with the pursuit of political objectives.

FROM FRAGMENTATION TO AUTONOMY

This book could have included many other instances of refugee shelter, but the seven chapters have been designed to provide an overview of some striking ways that humanitarians and designers have approached the problem. As should be clear from the summaries above, the key lesson from all these chapters is that emergency shelters consider just one fragment of a much bigger picture. The first chapter shows how shelter can be reduced to its basics. The second describes the idea that shelter can be constructed through metrics. The third suggests that shelter can be a form of politics. The fourth then examines what happens when shelter becomes a matter of tactics, working around political constraints and finding opportunities for advantage. The fifth chapter describes shelter as pragmatics, and the sixth chapter turns to a more Bachelardian approach, in which shelter is seen as poetics. The final chapter looks at how shelter can become dominated by concerns of beauty, symbolism, and aesthetics.

Taken together, these chapters show how shelter is provided in a way that tends to be partial and fragmented. With little time to act, humanitarians paternalistically impose their own ideas of shelter, rarely asking refugees what they consider most important about this basic human need. At the end of the book, I make a suggestion for how to address this—a design proposal of sorts. Refugee shelter, I argue, can either reproduce or resist the paternalistic restrictions faced by refugees in wider society. Shelter is too often saturated by grand ideas—symbolic architecture, expansive metrics of human life, ambitious political stands—but its most significant effects play out on the microscale: shaping where people wake, how they eat, and the conditions in which they sleep. The best examples of shelter, I conclude, seek to provide greater autonomy for people living in circumstances that are deliberately designed to deny it. The most important element to consider—which is so often neglected—is the ability to control simple things, from when the lights come on to what gets served for dinner. Such elements of life may seem trivial, but when people lose their homes, there is a sense in which their whole world falls apart. Places, people, and routines crack up around them. Without a home, everything becomes fragmented, as John Berger writes, but prioritizing the principle of autonomy might allow refugees to pick up the pieces and rebuild on firmer ground.³³

Notes

1. Dan Hicks and Sarah Mallet, Lande: The Calais ‘Jungle’ and Beyond (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019), 1–18.

2. Michel Agier, The Jungle: Calais’s Camps and Migrants (Medford: Polity, 2018); Oli Mould, “The Calais Jungle: A Slum of London’s Making,” City 21, no. 3–4 (2017): 388–404.

3. This particular building became more widely known in the United Kingdom when it featured in an edition of the television program Songs of Praise.

4. Oli Mould, “The Not-So-Concrete Jungle: Material Precarity in the Calais Refugee Camp,” Cultural Geographies 25, no. 3 (2018): 393–409. Everything was temporary because the police surrounded the camp and prevented any permanent building materials from being brought in—stone and steel were banned.

5. Elisa Sandri, “‘Volunteer Humanitarianism’: Volunteers and Humanitarian Aid in the Jungle Refugee Camp of Calais,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 65–80.

6. The official name for this container camp was the Centre d’Accueil Provisoire (Provisional Reception Center). For more on the use of shipping containers for refugee shelter, see Hanna Baumann, “Moving, Containing, Displacing: The Shipping Container as Refugee Shelter,” in Structures of Protection? Rethinking Refugee Shelter, ed. Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020), 15–29. See also Miriam Ticktin, “Calais: Containment Politics in the ‘Jungle,’” Funambulist Magazine 5 (2016): 29–33.

7. Cannelle Gueguen-Teil and Irit Katz, “On the Meaning of Shelter: Living in Calais’s Camps de la Lande,” in Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology, ed. Irit Katz, Diana Martín, and Claudio Minca (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 83–86; Irit Katz, “Between Bare Life and Everyday Life: Spatializing Europe’s Migrant Camps,” Architecture_MPS 12, no. 2 (2017): 4.

8. The walled municipal summer camp was officially called the Jules Ferry Centre but informally known as Al-Salaam. It was located on the edge of the Jungle and run by a French organization called la Vie Active. This was another more formal part of the humanitarian provision, providing showers and free supplies to residents.

9. These centers were widely known by the initialism CAO. For more on the peculiarities of humanitarianism and asylum in France, see Miriam Ticktin, “Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (2006): 33–49; Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). The final clearance and removal of the Jungle began on October 24, 2016.

10. For a powerful article and photo collection showing the destruction of the Jungle, see Alan Taylor, “France Dismantles ‘the Jungle’ in Calais,” The Atlantic, October 26, 2016.

11. Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst, trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Archipelago Books, 2009), 12. The poem from which these lines are taken is entitled “The House as Casualty.” The poignancy of the objects left buried in the ruins of the Jungle led many activists and artists to collect them for exhibitions and installations. See, e.g., Gideon Mendel, Dzhangal (London: GOST Books, 2017); Hicks and Mallet, Lande, 77–78.

12. At the time, Zaʾatari was in its infancy, but it would soon become one of the largest refugee camps in the world.

13. Svenja Schurade, “Writing a History of the ‘Long Summer of Migration,’” Journal Blog, Public Anthropologist, August 3, 2021, https://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2021/08/03/writing-a-history-of-the….

14. The term “refugee crisis” is unpopular with many scholars who prefer to frame this as a “refugee reception crisis” or “hospitality crisis.” See Seth Holmes and Heide Castañeda, “Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 12–24.

15. Florian Trauner and Jocelyn Turton, “‘Welcome Culture’: The Emergence and Transformation of a Public Debate on Migration,” Austrian Journal of Political Science 46, no. 1 (2017): 33–43. The three-year funding for this research was secured in 2016 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (grant ES/P005004/1). For a critical take on the relationship between crisis and research grants, see Heath Cabot, “The Business of Anthropology and the European Refugee Regime,” American Ethnologist 46, no. 3 (2019): 261–75.

16. My attitude at the time is summarized in Tom Scott-Smith, “Humanitarian Neophilia: The ‘Innovation Turn’ and Its Implications,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 12 (2016): 2229–51. For more critical literature on humanitarian design, see Stephen Collier et al., eds., “Little Development Devices / Humanitarian Goods,” special issue, Limn 9 (2017). For some intellectual foundations, see Jamie Cross and Alice Street, “Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” Anthropology Today 25, no. 4 (2009): 4–9; Peter Redfield, “Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 157–84.

17. For more on these designs, see Tom Scott-Smith, “Places for People: Architecture, Building, and Humanitarian Innovation,” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1, no. 3 (2019): 14–22. An overview of recent design in the shelter sector can be found in Esther Ruth Charlesworth, Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working after Disaster (London: Routledge, 2014). For further background, see Tom Scott-Smith, “Places of Partial Protection: Refugee Shelter since 2015,” in Structures of Protection? Rethinking Refugee Shelter, ed. Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020), 1–12.

18. Liisa Malkki, The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013). Other notable examples include literature on “aidland,” including David Mosse, ed., Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professional International Development (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011); Heather Hindman and Anne-Meike Fechter, eds., Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland (Sterling: Kumarian, 2011); Silke Roth, The Paradoxes of Aid Work: Passionate Professionals (London: Routledge, 2015).

19. For some classic texts on the relationship between shelter and society, see Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964); Paul Oliver, Shelter and Society (New York: Praeger, 1969); Paul Oliver, Dwellings: The House across the World (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987); Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969); Marcel Vellinga, “The End of the Vernacular: Anthropology and the Architecture of the Other,” Etnofoor 23, no. 1 (2011): 171–92.

20. This approach has been particularly influenced by the work of Tim Ingold. E.g., see Tim Ingold, “That’s Enough About Ethnography!,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 383–95; Tim Ingold, “Anthropology Contra Ethnography,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1 (2017): 21–26.

21. Daniel Bradburd, Being There: The Necessity of Fieldwork (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).

22. During this period, with my collaborator Mark E. Breeze, I also made a film, from which the images in this book are drawn. For the final multipart documentary, see the webpage “Shelter without Shelter,” Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, accessed November 26, 2023, https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/shelter-without-shelter.

23. Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–96.

24. I am indebted to Peter Redfield for this thought. For many years, blankets were central to emergency shelter: in 1978, Oxfam estimated that 66 percent of their shelter aid was in the form of blankets. See Jim Howard and Robert Mister, “Lessons Learnt by Oxfam from Their Experience of Shelter Provision 1970–1978,” Disasters 3, no. 2 (1979): 136–44. For a particularly fascinating anthropological study, see Lucy Norris, “Economies of Moral Fibre? Recycling Charity Clothing into Emergency Aid Blankets,” Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 4 (2012): 389–404.

25. For a reflective history of the 3.5-square-meter guidance, see Jim Kennedy and Charles Parrack, “The History of Three Point Five Square Metres,” in Shelter Projects 2011–2012, ed. Joseph Ashmore (Geneva: IFRC and UNHCR, 2013), 109–10.

26. Tom Corsellis and Antonella Vitale, Transitional Settlement: Displaced Populations (Oxford: Oxfam, 2005), 11, 411. Emphasis mine. Thanks to Jennifer George at the University of Cambridge for sharing her record of definitions in the shelter sector. This has subsequently appeared as Jennifer Ward George, Peter Guthrie, and John Orr, “Redefining Shelter: Humanitarian Sheltering,” Disasters 47, no. 2 (2023): 482–98.

27. UN-Habitat, Multilingual Glossary of Human Settlements Terms (Nairobi: United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, 1992), 121.

28. Enrico Quarantelli, “Patterns of Sheltering and Housing in US Disasters,” Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal 4, no. 3 (1995): 43–53. See also Jennifer Ward George, “Humanitarian Sheltering: Analysing Global Structures of Aid” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2023).

29. For an example, see Esther Schroeder Goh, “Structures to Shelter the Mind: Refugee Housing and Mental Wellbeing in Berlin,” in Structures of Protection? Rethinking Refugee Shelter, ed. Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020), 175–84.

30. Ian Davis, “What Have We Learned from 40 Years’ Experience of Disaster Shelter?,” Environmental Hazards 10, no. 3–4 (2011): 193–212; Ian Davis, Shelter after Disaster (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1978).

31. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 6.

32. Marina Warner, “Report: Bearer-Beings and Stories in Transit / Storie in Transito,” Marvels and Tales 31, no. 1 (2017): 149–50.

33. John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 56.