Somali refugees have developed a unique neighborhood with urban qualities– but also pronounced problems and deficiencies – that are hardly found in any other part of Nairobi. As a center of a hectic, efficient and very professionally run global trading network, which is providing all of East Africa with goods of daily needs, developed and built by residents with no legal status, and exhibiting an intense urban culture, Eastleigh is probably unique in its current form.

This is a text by Miches Agier on spatial order of refugee camps, published in 'Ethnography', 2002, vol 3, nr. 3. It works very well in combination with my texts and in preperation to the seminar on oct. 6th. Please download the full version of the text as a pdf file.

Two elements constitute a new category of world population, that of 50 million displaced persons and refugees: on the one
hand, so-called ‘dirty’ or ‘low-intensity’ wars, with the endless exoduses, suffering and multiple losses they provoke; on the other, the humanitarian response that accompanies them very closely. The camps are both the emblem of the social condition created by the coupling of war with humanitarian action, the site where it is constructed in the most elaborate manner, as a life kept at a distance from the ordinary social and political world, and the experimentation of the large-scale segregations that are being established on a planetary scale.

Draft version of a text on 'Refugee Camps' for the roundtable session on october 6th.

.... Refugee camps are usually planned by architects and technical planners of UNHCR. Based on the belief in global human rights and human needs valid and identical all over the world, the fundamental planning approach for camps is characterized by neutrality. The standardized plan for such a refugee camp starts with the tent or the refugee family as the smallest basic unit. This unit is then organized in to camp clusters (16 tents), camp blocks (16 clusters), camp sectors (4 blocks) and finally the complete camp (4 sectors) which in its ‘ideal’ case houses 20.000 refugees. Smaller tracks and non-motorized lanes separate clusters and blocks from each other, while roads for motorized traffic access the larger camp sectors. Overall, a small image of an idealized city starts to emerge, that in its belief in structured organization and clear separation of functions and uses is reminiscent of the urban planning of the modern era from the 1920s. This modernistic planning approach finds its application all over the world. But the pretty order, thoroughly based on western European planning ideals seems like a naïve fool’s planning in the dusty heat of the African desert, in the malaria and cholera infested tropical rainforests or in direct proximity to violent combat or war-like conditions. Regardless of whether the refugee drama is taking place in the dense jungle of Thailand, in the middle of the northern African desert or in the dry mountain regions of Iran, everywhere the same naïve model of an idealized city is used to project a camp-city of European understanding onto regions that could not be more different. Naiveté though becomes jeopardy in the context of violence and catastrophes and it is specifically its neutrality that makes this planning approach so susceptible to instrumentalization and politicalization. ....

Introduction to the theme of 'architecture of humanitarian relief' for the roundtable session on october 6th.

Spaces of live saving interventions, of humanitarian aid and relief, are multiplying in our globalized world. They are products and consequences of war, natural catastrophes, situations of economical plight and other calamities. The spaces of humanitarian relief exist in the shape of refugee camps, hospitals and medical units, international tribunals, bases of protection forces as well as dispensaries for provisions of basic needs, among many others...

please download and read the attached PDF file for the full version.

The text and a scan of the Arch+ article on 'Research Architecture'.
Sorry, German only:

Wir müssen uns eingestehen, dass die Architekturszene von einem Gefühl der Langeweile befangen ist. Wo alle Häuser gebaut wurden, die wir auf absehbare Zeit benötigen, wo mit allen Formen schon gespielt wurde, die sich der Architekt ausdenken kann, wo jedes herstellbare Material schon irgendwie seine Anwendung in Gebäuden gefunden hat, und sei sie noch so absurd, hat unter einem neo-liberalen Drang unermüdlicher Erneuerung, die in eine strukturelle Eintönigkeit abzugleiten droht, ein Formalismus der Verzweifelung bedrohliche Ausmaße angenommen. Es stellt sich die Frage, ob eine Lehre und Forschung der Architektur nicht grundsätzlich andere Strategien einschlagen muss, wenn diese Disziplin noch irgendwie ernst genommen werden möchte. Auch nach der x-ten Meisterklasse eines ‚Star-Architekten’ mit immer professionelleren, gemorphten Formen, bedarf es beständig mehr Wohlwollen, den in diesem Kontext entstandenen Arbeiten, eine Relevanz zuzusprechen. Auch wenn der Bauboom in China und Dubai noch ein Bedarfsdruck vorgaukelt, der jedoch immer stärker wie eine Fatahmorgana der 90er Jahre scheint, gilt es zu resümieren, dass sich dieses Verständnis von Architektur erschöpft hat.

This is an essay by Giorgio Agamben on Hannah Arendt's writing "We Refugees" which was published in 1943, and in which she develops the idea of "the right to have rights."

Giorgio Agamben. We Refugees.
Translated by Michael Rocke.

1. In 1943, in a small jewish periodical, The Menorah Journal, Hannah Arendt published an article titled "We Refugees." In this brief but important essay, after sketching a polemical portrait of Mr. Cohn, the assimilated Jew who had been 150 percent German, 150 percent Viennese, and 150 percent French but finally realizes bitterly that "on ne parvient pas deux fois," Arendt overturns the condition of refugee and person without a country - in which she herself was living - in order to propose this condition as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness. The refugee who has lost all rights, yet stops wanting to be assimilated at any cost to a new national identity so as to contemplate his condition lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain unpopularity, an inestimable advantage: "For him history is no longer a closed book, and politics ceases to be the privilege of the Gentiles. He knows that the banishment of the Jewish people in Europe was followed immediately by that of the majority of the European peoples. Refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the avant-garde of their people."

The German architectural weekly magazine reviews the Archipelago of Exception conference in its last issue.