Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When we think of refugee camps we probably imagine rows of tents, rapidly erected responses to crises. We might envision those seemingly ubiquitous UN tarpaulins in blue and white. But the problem with emergency temporary shelter is that it usually stays around.These rapidly-built settlements may endure for generations, becoming townships, developing their own urbanity, their architectural infrastructures of education, community and healthcare. The informal becomes institutionalised, the ad hoc concretised.The problem, of course, is precarity. These camps are intended to be temporary, the residents often dependent on aid and the hospitality of their hosts, stripped of much of their agency. Often located where the local population faces extreme hardship, the issues around these camps can be exacerbated by resentment of the aid received by refugees.Yet somehow camps are built and people manage to maintain and build lives in them — Cooper’s Camp in Nadia, West Bengal, a temporary refugee camp established after the Partition of India in 1947, is still home to thousands. There are vast camps such as those around Dadaab in eastern Kenya, housing more than 300,000 refugees in minimal conditions of basic shelter. At the other end of the scale is Kilis in southern Turkey, where there are sophisticated new shelters. Syrian refugees have repopulated a city centre that had been almost abandoned by local residents who had moved to more modern accommodation outside the historic core. Refugee settlements are a necessity in response to crises, which are increasingly climate as well as conflict driven, but can they evolve and be made better? And what is their future? “Many refugee camps were established in the 20th century without much planning,” says Nerea Amorós Elorduy, an architect, researcher and founder of Creative Assemblages (a “think-and-do tank”). “Those older parts were more organic and people tend to prefer that. The default plan, though, is the grid. It’s odd because in urban studies we learn how cities develop organically, how they respond to topography, about the nuances and the routes, and then, when we plan for refugee settlements, we make them like military camps.“Things like walkable cities . . . or how we should make a city good for children to live in [so it becomes] better for everyone — we forget this when we plan for refugees,” she adds. “It would be great if we started with more exchange between urban studies and humanitarian urbanism.” The UNHCR is advocating alternatives to camps. We hope they should be a last resortThere have been repeated attempts to create more hospitable, liveable and communal places but they often fail. One frequent proposal has been the communal kitchen, an attempt to foster community, share resources and labour and encourage interaction, particularly among women. “I have worked in 11 countries . . . and I have never seen one that worked,” says Roupen Alexandrian, an operations director at UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. “When people are in crisis, they don’t associate with communal spaces and [consequently] don’t take care of them. People make kitchens in their shelters, their homes. That is their refuge.”Rama Nimri, an architect who is a settlement planning officer at UNHCR, says approaches are shifting. “The UNHCR is advocating alternatives to camps,” she says. “We hope they should be a last resort. It is true they provide safety but they also isolate refugees and foster dependency on aid, and they can create friction with local communities. Instead we hope for . . . a ‘settlement approach’, where refugees can live alongside local residents.”This depends on the policies and approaches of host nations but it has significant advantages, she says. Both Nimri and Elorduy point to Brazil and Colombia, where millions of refugees, most notably from Venezuela, have been absorbed into communities with remarkably little hostility, and often positive economic outcomes for host communities.“When refugees are allowed the freedom to work, it creates development,” says Nimri, pointing to Kenya’s attempts to foster a settlement approach at Kalobeyei, just outside the huge Kakuma refugee camp. In part, this is an understandable effort by a host country to capture some of the investment made by the UN and other non-governmental organisations in building “temporary” camps. If some of that investment can be used to create hospitals, schools and other civic infrastructure that can also benefit local residents, everybody wins.In Kilis in Turkey, the 120,000 Syrian refugees who arrived during the civil war exceeded local residents — though some of the former have since dispersed. The two communities, initially wary, have begun to adapt to each other’s traditions, even down to the colours used to paint their shelters and modest civic buildings. The influx has transformed the once downtrodden town into an active, busy metropolis, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.Big name architects have been keen to be involved, including Norman Foster, Shigeru Ban and Zaha Hadid Architects. While there is some scepticism about starry interventions, the architects Yasmeen Lari and Marina Tabassum have attracted widespread attention.Lari has worked with refugees from Pakistan’s catastrophic floods to create resilient and beautiful structures using local materials, both domestic and civic (she calls it “barefoot social architecture”). Some of the refugees, particularly women, have learnt to make the materials and structures, providing a living for the future.Tabassum, meanwhile, has been involved in the creation of small “Khudi Bari” houses for the Ganges flood plain in Bangladesh — resilient housing adapted to climate change. She has also worked in Cox’s Bazar in south-eastern Bangladesh, the world’s biggest settlement, housing nearly 1mn Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar. The buildings of local materials and modest means could not be further from the ubiquitous UN tents.The “paradox of permanent temporariness” is hauntingly captured in a provocative work by architects DAAR, Andy Hilal and Alessandro Petti. “Concrete Tent” is an installation, originally built in 2015 in the Dheisheh refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, which has since become a roving artwork.Described as a “space for collective mourning and solidarity with Palestine”, the tent-shaped structure, reimagined in a more permanent form, embodies the gap between the tent and the monument, the ephemeral and the eternal. That almost 2mn people were recently displaced by war in Gaza reminds us that the work’s subject remains painfully urgent.Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
