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- Convenors:
-
Kivanc Kilinc
(American University of Beirut)
Mohammad Gharipour (Morgan State University)
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- Stream:
- Migration and Borders
- Location:
- Aula 11
- Sessions:
- Monday 15 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
At a time when the refugee crisis has increasingly become an urban problem across the globe, this panel seeks proposals that analyze how various refugee populations have adapted to, personalized and transformed the use of "permanent" structures in city centers.
Long Abstract:
Ongoing wars and political turmoil across the globe have caused millions of people to take refuge in neighboring countries or travel long distances to safer areas. Most of the refugee camps continue to accommodate millions of people cramped in tiny shelters and keep growing both in size and population. While some of the older camps eventually became permanent residential areas and were absorbed into traditional urban settlements, increasingly more refugees have been relocated in existing city centers (i.e., in poor quality hotels, unused public buildings, and peripheral neighborhoods) without having access to basic amenities. Such recent developments have shifted the focus away from isolated camp settlements and made the refugee crisis primarily an urban problem, whereas the issues concerning the integration of new communities into existing cities have remained largely unaddressed. This panel seeks proposals that analyze how various refugee populations, regardless of their location, have adapted to, personalized and transformed the use of existing, "permanent" structures, while in transit from camps to urban centers. The papers may also explore: the conceptualization of new building types that go beyond the typically narrow definition of the tent and the container; the development of public art projects for the integration of refugee communities in urban contexts; the relationship between existing urban neighborhoods and new refugee settlements; and cross-cultural collaborations which have informed the design of refugee settlements with higher public health and safety standards. We welcome proposals that deploy chronologically diverse, methodically nuanced, interdisciplinary, and comparative approaches.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 15 April, 2019, -Are John Knudsen (Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI))
Paper short abstract:
Since the mid-1980s, generations of refugees have sought refuge in the ramshackle Gaza Buildings, a multi-story hospital complex ruined during the civil war. The paper analyzes buildings as spatial archives of displacement, an example of emergency urbanism and housing refuges in urban heterotopia.
Paper long abstract:
Since the mid-1980s, generations of refugees have sought refuge in the ramshackle Gaza Buildings, a multi-story hospital complex built by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Damaged during the civil war, the buildings have since turned urban heterotopia - squat, refuge and shelter - that otherwise blend in with the run-down Sabra-Shatila neighbourhood in Beirut's "misery belt". Forming part of a global landscape of insecure areas, the inhabitants are disconnected from majority society which can serve as a trope for the exclusion of generations of refugees that typifies the new domain of "urban refugees" now common throughout the Middle East. The paper charts the buildings' history and main characters: the lodgers, landlords, and gatekeepers who respectively lease, rent and control the dilapidated buildings' dark corridors, cramped flats and garbage-strewn stairways. By analysing the buildings as historical and spatial archives of displacement and an example of emergency urbanism whereby displaced people seek refuge in cities. The multi-story buildings can be read a vertical migration history where generations of refugees and migrants have escaped repeated conflict, displacement and destitution. Examining the decaying buildings' architectural history, hence, provides a temporal genealogy of reception, place making and emplacement that can inform the study of diasporic space and materiality.
Charalampos Tsavdaroglou (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the refugees' right to the city in Athens where more than ten State-run camps in the outskirts of the city and several refugee squatted buildings in the center of the city establish a dialectic contrast.
Paper long abstract:
A noticeable body of literature explores aspects of social philanthropy, NGOs' activities and State immigration policies related to the ongoing refugee crisis. However, there is little attempt to research how the refugees themselves self-organize and enact the production of collective housing common spaces based on principles of self-organization and mutual help. This paper aims to fill this gap.
Following the recent spatial approaches on "commons" and "enclosures" the paper compares and contrasts refugee led solidarity housing commons with State-run refugee camps.
The paper focuses empirically on Greece, which is situated at the epicentre of the refugee crisis, and on Athens in particular, the capital of Greece and the main refugee transit city with almost 20 thousand refugees. Most of the refugees are settled in State-run camps on the outskirts of the city, however a growing amount is accommodated in self-organized occupied buildings in the urban core. Focused on this context, the paper examines the refugees' right to housing and to the city as it is expressed by the State housing policies and the solidarity housing practices of newly arrived refugees.
The paper is based in participatory action research and ethnographic analysis and the main findings are that the refugees do not only challenge the State-run camps, but also seek to negotiate and go beyond cultural, class, gender, religious and political identities. Consequently, the newcomers are transformed into an unpredictable and misfitted multitude that claim the right to city and produce unique housing common spaces, spaces in movement and threshold spaces.
Hatice Pinar Senoguz Ovayolu (University of Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper studies housing of female asylum seekers in the small but hospitable city of Göttingen through the reception policies of German federal states as well as support networks woven by civic initiatives and explores various contention about the housing settings as gendered spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper studies housing of female asylum seekers in the small but hospitable city of Göttingen through the reception policies of German federal states as well as support networks woven by civic initiatives. While the housing in the city of Göttingen is an orchestrated effort by the local government and humanitarian organization housing the asylum seekers in collective shelters, the private housing being offered to those with better prospects to stay, even if with uncontentious cases of medical condition requiring hygiene and care. Therefore, the accommodation of female asylum seekers reveals contention among various actors about the rationalization and implementation of gender-specific needs about housing in collective spaces. The contention mainly revolves around refugee shelter lacking "minimum standards" of housing. The concerns among civil society, as well as asylum seekers arise about especially shelters deemed to be temporary, warehouses and other buildings put into service as housing as an emergency response after the long summer of migration 2015. On the other hand, the asylum seekers with unfavorable prospects to stay may be also forced out of the shelters with fear of deportation and seek refuge in church asylum, shared apartments and squatter housings promoted by civic initiatives. This paper, focusing on the female asylum seekers caught in a limbo residing in these places, explores the contention on refugee housing in urban settings as gendered spaces. It also inquires the tension between the housing and home emerging in these settings, through a narrative-biological approach on everyday home-making of asylum seekers.
Stéphanie Dadour (École nationale supérieure d'architcture de Grenoble)
Paper short abstract:
In France, to overcome the state's disengagement of "migrants" inflow, citizens decide to host them. Hospitality is not a spontaneous act, it requires an effort. Through occupancy plans and interviews, this contribution focuses on the stories, spaces and times of everyday life of hosts and guests.
Paper long abstract:
In the 2010s, the influx of "migrants" is one of the main topics of French politics. Because Human rights are the foundations of the French Republic, the country can not admit to close its borders like some other countries of the European Union - but it doesn't open them neither.
In the north of France, in Calais, ferry port and centre for transport and trading with Great Britain, many organizations have worked in migrants' informal settlements. In the Alpes-Maritimes, Cédric Herrou, a young farmer and militant who has been arrested several times, became a media figure in welcoming and helping migrants in his region. In the capital, city gates and voids under the sky-train have been appropriated and ethnicized by these travelling populations.
The political decisions, the regularization system, the control and the treatment of "migrant" people demonstrate the current state of crisis. In order to overcome the disengagement of the state with regard to these populations, some citizens (sometimes through associations) decided to host them.
Hospitality is not a spontaneous act, it requires an individual effort: who are these people who have agreed to receive at home, to live with strangers of whom they know nothing?
Through occupancy plans and interviews, this contribution focuses on the stories, spaces and times of everyday life of hosts and guests: the private and the public, the relation to the body, the borders and the thresholds, the spoken and the unspoken, the relationship to technologies, to habits, the stories and worldviews.
Maria Curtis (University of Houston-Clear Lake)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the living conditions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees resettled in urban apartment complexes in Houston, Texas. This research explores Agamben's theory of "bare life" and how the refugee story reveals larger and deeper tears in the social fabric of contemporary democracy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the living conditions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees resettled in urban apartment complexes in Houston, Texas. Because the American immigration system has not increased in terms of its initial financial support given to refugees since its inception in the 1970s when large numbers of Vietnamese refugees were arriving, family monthly allotments remain well below the poverty level. The sparsity of financial support in the early stages of refugee resettlement effectively places refugees among America's most poor. Resettlement agencies place refugees in dilapidated apartment complexes that are often unsafe or are in neighborhoods where public transportation is scant because they must maximize limited funds for large family groups. Church and mosque networks have buffered the increased budget cuts to resettlement staff common during the Trump administration by volunteering to serve as adoptive families, offering delivery of food and medical supplies, making mobile dispensaries and immunizations available. Refugees with agrarian ties network on donated land to grow produce and make their way into local famer's markets and specialty food stores. Aware of the linguistic diversity existing in refugee communities, public libraries have created art spaces and added titles in numerous languages to encourage greater engagement in public spaces. The presence of refugees in urban settings often revitalizes economically lagging neighborhoods and ultimately makes them greener and safer. This research explores the implications for Agamben's theory of "bare life" and how the refugee story reveals larger and deeper tears in the social fabric of contemporary democracy.