Opening up the possibility of participation and appropriation to the inhabitants of refugee camps can make them more liveable places, say certain experts.
The mention of a refugee camp often evokes various images: from tent cities in Europe to sprawling settlements in Africa that emerged over decades of conflict and famine, the situations can be extremely heterogeneous.
Some 6.6 million people currently live in refugee camps in Kenya, Jordan, Bangladesh and Sudan alone, that is 22 percent of the world’s refugee population. Many refugee camps become long-lasting, sometimes even evolving into the size of small cities. From this, arises a dilemma: how can refugee camps be made into more welcoming places despite their transitory nature?
For the architect Cyrille Hanappe, who has been actively engaged in a series of projects in Calais, the Grand-Synthé refugee camp and in Mayotte, the answer is based on accompanying the inhabitants of refugee camps and implicating himself as a technician to lower the risks that people are exposed to.
"We cannot decree what needs to be accomplished," Hanappe said, adding that even the word "camp" needed to be reimagined, to go beyond a certain preconception of what housing for displaced people should look like.
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Letting refugees participate designing their environment
For the architect, the philosophical tract, "What cannot be stolen. The Verstohlen Chart" (Ce qui ne peut être vole. Charte de Verstohlen) by Cynthia Fleury and Antoine Fenoglio, is primordial to understanding – and overcoming – the tension between improving the lives of people and the unstable environments they inhabit.
The humanitarian manifesto lists ten items, in non-hierarchical order, from having a horizon to silence, that are non-negotiable for having "a good life". In a time of unprecedented displacement, when conflicts all over the world are forcing increasing numbers of people to leave their homes, the tract recommends using the vulnerability of humans as an asset.
This means it should be out of question to "be displaced and wandering", said Fleury to the radio FranceInter. "It means becoming, constructing, preserving views, etc." Allowing refugees to participate in designing their environment and appropriating the space delegated to them is part of the equation, said Hanappe.
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The case of Grande-Synthe in northern France
In the case of Grande-Synthe, a camp near Dunkerque, the humanitarian association Utopia 56 in 2016 mandated the camp’s management to the refugees themselves, who were responsible for cleaning and cooking in the camp.
The inhabitants also participated in the camp’s conception, by constructing porches, extensions connecting two different units, and extra rooms. "The devil is in the details," said Hanappe, "the same camp, depending on how it is managed, can be very different."
On the other end of the spectrum, closed camps function more like prisons or nursing homes. Migrants in these places are subjected to the power of the authorities running the camp, and they spend most of their time waiting – to be fed, to have a shower, to eventually be allowed to leave.
Migrants can experience different types of refugee camps at various stages of their journey, wrote Yasmina Bouagga and Céline Barré, in Volume 4 of "Babel Investigations on the migrant condition".
The volatile nature of camps can make them different places over the course of time, wrote the two authors. [At the Grande-Synthe camp, for example, conflicting groups of Afghans and Kurds lit the camp on fire in April 2016, reducing half of it to rubble.]
The 1940 film "Grapes of Wrath", based on John Steinbeck's novel, explores the changing nature of camps through the journey of a mid-Western family to California. As the family moves toward their destination, they stay in various settlements, from oppressive to more liberal environments.
The notion of temporality will always be integral to refugee camps, even though an architect is legally required to design something that will last for at least 10 years, said Hanappe. "If people are in a place, it means they are in the least bad place they could find. They must be accompanied, like with a doctor – unconditionally."
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