Housing Refugees

Planning News | April 2018

Refugee camps are cities. The average stay for refugees in camps run by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is 17 years. Palestinian refugees have been living in camps since 1948. (And they now number 5 million people).

According to architecture undergraduate Sophie Flinder, architects and planners should study camps like ‘The Jungle’ in Calais, France in order to assist refugee agencies to build better camps in the future.  Flinder spent six months studying the history of the camp and charting its transformation from "a non-place to a place".

 ‘The Jungle’ originally described the squats that started to appear in Calais after the closure in 2002 of a nearby Red Cross migrant centre. These were small illegal squats, often divided by nation and religion and spread over a large area of scrub between the woods and the sand dunes.  At first there was little attention from the media and the authorities, however the increasing number of refugees caused tension between France and the UK and squats were frequently raided or demolished. In 2009 the Jungle, which then housed 1,500 refugees, was bulldozed. 

In 2015 a new refugee centre was built, accommodating 500 women and minors. This also provided access to toilets and showers for others in the surrounding ‘tolerated area’. By March 2015, around 2,000 refugees of different nationalities and religions were settled in different parts of the Jungle, expressing their identities through structures and ornamentation.

With the influx of refugees to Europe over the summer of 2015, the Jungle became even more dense and lines between nationalities and religions were erased.  
By December 2015, there were 7,000 inhabitants. This led to increased media attention and thus more volunteers going to Calais. French authorities started demolishing the Jungle in 2016. (Incoming, a film by the Irish artist Robert Mosse, currently at the NGV, presents graphic images of the demolition).

“What was built in the Jungle was based on the refugees' desires, memories and shared symbols. Shelter, religion, education, trading and culture are five clear aspects of any community and they were present in the Jungle. With the amenities provided by volunteers the camp became more or less self-contained, covering the refugees' basic needs as well as offering opportunities to create a daily life. The business of the Jungle's very own shopping street was similar to other high streets on a Saturday”  (Fairs 2016).

 DISPLACED

UNHCR estimates that there are 65.6 million displaced people in the world and that nearly 20 people every minute are forcibly displaced as a result of conflict or persecution. Of the 65.6 million, 22.5 million are refugees (UNHCR 2017). Since August 2018, 1 million Rohingya need to be added to these figures .

STATELESS

Between 3.2 million and 10 million people across 75 countries are stateless and have no documentation and no identity. The plight of the Rohingya, who have lived in the borderlands of Myanmar and Bangladesh while belonging to neither, has again bought this issue to the forefront.

A new UN ‘Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework’ (CRRF) is being developed to safeguard protection rights, such as: universal birth registration to prevent statelessness, allowing children to take the nationality of the country they are born in and eliminating laws that discriminate on the grounds of minority status. Ethiopia recently gave the almost 900,000 refugees it is hosting the right to documentation under its national civil registration system.  For refugees this means access to basic services, education, future employment and the right to exist under the law. Refugee babies born in Ethiopia will have the right to birth certificates, and refugees will be afforded other documentation such as marriage and death certificates.

SETTLEMENT

Not all refugees live in official camps and many are still in transition camps or squats like The Jungle. The countries hosting the most refugees are in the Middle East – Palestinian and recent refugees – Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Uganda and Ethiopia. “Lebanon’s one million Syrian refugees amount to a quarter of its population and Jordan’s 660,000 refugees are straining its housing market and water resources."(UNHCR, 2018).

In his study of refugees, mostly in Africa in the 1990s, Michel Agier (2011) categorised refugee settlement as follows:

Self-organised refuges  - ‘cross-border points’, informal camp-grounds, ‘jungles’, ghettos’, ‘grey zones’, ‘squats’; extremely precarious hiding places and provisional shelters, often illegal. Zones squatted by displaced persons and refugees exist in many African towns, especially in Khartoum or Conakry.  

Sorting centres - transit centres, ‘way stations’, ‘holding centres’, camps for foreigners, waiting zones; As distinct from self-organised refuges, these are under the direct control of national administrations, police institutions, UN agencies and/or humanitarian NGOs. Irrespective of the continent, these transit spaces usually involve selection, expulsion or admission. (Or imprisonment in the case of Australia).     

Sorting centres are situated at the entrance to UNHCR sites in order to receive, register and verify the physical state of the refugees who have just arrived and to channel them appropriately. Once all the checks have been carried out, they find a place in a tent or shelter already existing within the refugee camp.

Unprotected reserves - camps for internally displaced persons.

Spaces of confinement - refugee camps and UNHCR rural settlements house a significant proportion of the world’s displaced population.

“The ban on working and more generally the absence of rights outside the camp in the host country often leads to inactivity, apathy and dependence on humanitarian care and assistance or towards local networks of informal work and commerce”

- Michel Agier  
Managing the Undesirables (2011)

REFUGEE CAMPS

The sites established by the UNHCR range from settlements of a few thousand, 10,000 – 70,000 or up to 200,000 people (as in the case of the Rawandan camps in the Congo in 1994-96). The largest camp now is that of the Rohingya on the Bangladeshi border with over 800,000 inhabitants. Dadaab camp in Kenya, with its four sub-camps of Hagadera, Ifo, Dagahaley and Kambios, spread over about 50 square kilometres, is the second-largest with 245,160 people in April 2017. “To the Kenyan government it is a nursery for terrorists. To its quarter of a million residents it is their last resort. Its entire economy is grey; its citizens live on rations and luck” (Rawlence 2016). 

Generally, camps are established on unoccupied or institutional land. The Rohingya refugees are camped in a former wild life reserve; refugees in Poland were housed in a former military camp. Many Palestinian camps are on land leased by the host country from local landowners. “The first constructions are usually large tents and the refugees go on to construct one or two-room huts and cabins out of mud-brick and wood with roofs of thatch or plastic. The central tent might be taken away when all the cabins have been constructed.  At the same time, in a few months or anything up to a year there is a gradual improvement of dirt roads, systems of water supply (wells, cisterns, pipe networks and stand pipes) latrines, septic tanks, as well as some public buildings (clinic, school, camp administration).” (Agier 2011).

Describing the African camps of the 1990s, Agier (2011) writes: “In parallel with the material construction of the camp, an original social formation arises. The distribution of American maize or bulgar wheat, oil and salt is made monthly, sector leaders appear from among the original tent heads, churches or video shops are built out of mud-brick, market places and football pitches are improvised. Even if it is understood that the camp does not have a planned duration, everyone builds a living space that may be precarious but is relatively habitable. The ban on working and more generally the absence of rights outside the camp in the host country often leads to inactivity, apathy and dependence on humanitarian care and assistance or towards local networks of informal work and commerce” (Agier 2011).   

Palestinian Refugee Camps

The biggest group of refugees in the world are Palestinians - persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict. Most live in 58 recognised Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and receive support from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). UNRWA also maintains schools, health centres and distribution centres in areas outside the recognised camps. The descendants of Palestinian refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Today, some 5 million are eligible for UNRWA services (UNHCR 2018). (This is the population of Melbourne).

Socio-economic conditions in the camps are generally poor, with high population density, cramped living conditions and inadequate basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers. The responsibility of UNRWA in Palestine refugee camps is limited to providing services and administering its installations. The Agency does not own, administer or police the camps, as this is the responsibility of the host authorities. UNRWA has a camp services office in each camp, which the residents visit to update their records or to raise issues relating to Agency services with the Camp Services Officer (CSO). The CSO, in turn, refers refugee concerns and petitions to the UNRWA administration in the area in which the camp is located.

Jordan hosts more than 2 million Palestinian refugees and most, but not all, have full citizenship.  Nearly ten thousand Palestine refugees from Syria have recently sought assistance from UNRWA in Jordan. Even before the outbreak of the current conflict, in 2011, Palestinian refugees in Syria were a vulnerable population. Although they had many of the rights of Syrian citizens - including access to social services provided by the Government of Syria - they lagged behind the host population in key development indicators such as higher rates of infant mortality and lower rates of school enrolment. 

The Gaza Strip is home to a population of approximately 1.9 million people, including 1.3 million Palestinian refugees. Conflict and the blockade over the last decade have left 80 per cent of the population dependent on international assistance and daily life is unravelling.  “The jails are filling with shopkeepers arrested for unpaid debts. At markets, shelves remain mostly full but there are no buyers. Medical supplies are dwindling, clinics closing and 12-hour power outages threaten hospitals, the water is almost undrinkable and raw sewage is befouling beaches and fishing grounds…The average unemployment rate is now well over 41 per cent – one of the highest in the world. The number of Palestine refugees relying on UNRWA for food aid has increased from fewer than 80,000 in 2000 to almost one million in 2017” (Halbfinger 2018).  

Za’atari

The refugee camp at Za’atari in Jordan houses 80,000 Syrian refugees. Speaking to Dezeen magazine in 2015 Kilian Kleinschmidt, a UNHCR worker,  described the early days of the camp where internet connectivity and distributing Jordanian sim cards were as almost as important as access to water and energy.

“Energy is the big one. At Za’atari, the UNHCR never planned to provide electricity for the households. So people took it themselves from the power lines running through the camp. Electricity means safety, it means social life, it means business. Big business! People were charging €30 per connection and more” (Radford 2015). The use of Tesla batteries improved energy storage and in November 2017 the largest solar plant of its kind ever built in a refugee camp went live in Za’atari. The 12.9-megawatt peak solar photovoltaic plant was funded by the German government, through the KfW Development bank at a cost of 15 million Euros. The plant was built with a combination of labour from the refugee camp and local Jordanians and included training (UNHCR).

Kleinschmidt also describes the Syrians attempts to recreate home. “Syrians, for their wellbeing, need a fountain and a birdcage and a plant and they need to sit next to the fountain to drink tea… So everybody at Za’atari was building fountains. Fountains were even built in the middle of tents. Huge fountains built with little pebbles and stuff. They were investing the little they had into having a water pump with water coming out” (Radford 2015).

The Future of camps?

Like Sophie Flinder, Michel Agier (2011) also documents the ways refugees make changes and meet challenges that can transform the camps, sometimes making them into towns. Kleinschmidt says that “Governments should stop thinking about refugee camps as temporary places. These are the cities of tomorrow.  In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city” (Radford 2015).

Michael Millar, a legal and policy consultant from the USA has founded a group called ‘Refugee Cities’ to apply best practices from Special Enterprise Zones (SEZs) to expand opportunities for migrants so they can exercise their skills and vocations even while displaced (www.Refugee Cities).  “Refugee Cities’ project suggests establishing businesses in unused buildings near refugee settlements so they become urban areas with uses ranging from residential, office, factory, retail, social services and public transport. The project is attracting support from major international financial institutions like the World Bank, who have committed to invest in refugee-inclusive SEZs in Jordan and Ethiopia.  

The UNHCR has also begun working with MIT's D-Lab - one of the partners of Refugee Cities - to develop design strategies that enable refugees to solve their own problems rather than relying on solutions provided by aid agencies. UNHCR also ran a ‘Refugee Challenge’ for a ‘What Design Can Do’ conference in Amsterdam. The design competition sought ideas "for accommodating, connecting, integrating and helping the personal development of refugees".

In 2014, the UNHCR announced that it would be shifting away from promoting refugee camps and that instead it would search for more durable solutions, such as methods of integrating people into the local population. Apart from the sheer size of the existing settlements, convincing host governments to participate effectively in integration efforts will be very challenging politically and could take generations to achieve.