Refugee Camp: A Literature Review
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 149, Issue 4
Abstract
Refugee camps have come a long way since first formally established at the end of the 19th century, evolving from temporary, emergency encampments to long-lasting, multifaceted human settlements used as a provisional housing response to urgent situations. This paper takes an approach supported by the analysis of the development of refugee camps over time, adopting a methodology of reviewing the literature on the subject, including institutional materials and academic publications. The objective is to set a structured knowledge obtained through semisystematic analyses that allow the confirmation of the need to adopt a new approach, in which refugee camps should not be assumed as temporary interventions, and as such, more structured interventions should be developed in the means and over time. From the review of the literature and the historical facts gathered, a chronological account is presented that allows an evaluation in which the evolution in the approach to the refugee camps is revealed. The same investigation also compares assumptions obtained from the analyses of similar recent works with the practical reality and the operations effectively carried out in refugee camps. The assessment reveals an evolution in the approach of researching the subject, having started with practical and operational connotations and incorporating normative aspects before progressing to a more analytical style, as identified in recent works. The article exposes the fact that those changes in approach are a reflection of the response to the growing physical and social complexities of the object of study, and it indicates points of intransience and meaning in the contemporary context of humanitarian habitat. The article also highlights the importance of a better understanding of the status quo of refugee settlements as a means to improve their planning and management.
Introduction
Currently, there are more than 6 million refugees living in hundreds of refugee camps, spread across more than 30 countries on different continents. These camps are regarded as temporary settlements with basic infrastructure; however, some are more than 50 years old, as evidenced by Palestinian camps established in the late 1940s, while others have the population and size of traditional cities. The Dadaab Refugee Complex is Kenya’s tenth largest city by population with nearly 230,000 residents (UNHCR 2021a). The Nakivale camp in Uganda has the same geographical size as the city of Kolkata in India (UNHCR 2014), and a few camps have a higher density than cities like New York City, which has approximately 10,715 persons per square kilometer (United States Census Bureau 2021). The Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, for instance, has a density of approximately 13,000 refugees per square kilometer (UNHCR 2019a), while Zaatari Camp in Jordan has a density of 24,212 refugees per square kilometer (UNHCR 2019b).
This phenomenon of consolidation of refugee camps into large, dense, and enduring communities has been caused by substantial growth in the number of forcibly displaced people, along with the prolongation of emergency situations. Compounding the problem is a dearth of resettlement alternatives, due in part to an increase in protectionism by potential host countries. Long-lasting factors such as uncontrolled human population growth, along with adverse environmental changes, are aggravating the situation. At the end of 2020, more than 82 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide (UNHCR 2021b), representing approximately 1% of the global population.
Despite the described scenario, the planning and management of camps still rest on interim, rather than long-term, solutions, making the strategies currently employed unsustainable, and precluding their proper development as places that may endure for many decades. Furthermore, realistic assessments of their development over time are seldom made, and the refugees’ determination to improve their living conditions is ignored. This lack of understanding about refugee camps can be validated through the spatial inadequacy observed in many of them, which inevitably causes severe stress and misery, and consequently high levels of physical and psychological problems among its residents.
Knowledge previously acquired on a research topic not only provides the basis for its further investigation but can also serve as a valuable way to map the development of the object of study over time (Snyder 2019). Literature review as a research method can, therefore, be a relevant way of studying refugee camps.
This article provides an insight into the development of refugee camps through a semisystematic review of some of the main publications hitherto written on the subject, from the first documents, which focused on practical and operational aspects, to the incorporation of normative aspects, and more recently providing a more analytical approach to the object of study, including comparisons between camps and cities. The article focuses on the spatial aspect, in terms of planning and structure to demonstrate that camps have evolved physically and socially and, as such, planners and administrators ought to take a different approach, by considering their complexities engendered by endurance, as well as the high probability of them surpassing their intended duration and all repercussions that it entails.
Materials and Methods
This research is supported by the literature review of peer-reviewed papers on the object of study and the issue at stake, critically identified in materials from institutions that work with refugee camps, including manuals, reports, and summaries of evaluations, and in relevant academic bodies of work of authors who laid the foundation for studies on the subject, through case studies and theoretical analysis.
The investigation employed, as an initial approach, a bibliometric analysis (Donthu et al. 2021) using publication-related metrics sourced from the SCOPUS database. The performance analysis technique was used to demonstrate the level of interest in the topic over time and the number of documents per subject area. The science mapping technique was employed, using citation analysis to identify works that had a significant influence on the development of the topic of refugee camps, and using VOSviewer (version 1.6.19) software to analyze the keywords from documents listed in the same SCOPUS database.
The investigation continued with a narrative review to obtain foundation knowledge on the object of study and identify knowledge gaps. Besides the documents sourced from the SCOPUS database, the materials were also identified through a search on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) archive, through online search engines, such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic, materials collected during conferences and training courses, and through recommendations from experts on the subject, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines, such as geography, political sciences, sociology, economics, and health and environmental sciences.
Once the collected information was compiled and analyzed, a distinctive difference was identified between the first works and more recent ones, regarding the main focus of their study. A semisystematic review was then implemented, aiming to track and understand the particular phenomenon of the development of refugee camps throughout time. From all the material collected during the investigation, only a few were selected to be included in this article. Those documents were chosen because they are reference papers and reports, representing remarkable changes in the analysis of the development of refugee camps, such as the work from Cuny (Intertect, unpublished report, 1971), being the first document to introduce a change in the way camps were designed, the Handbook of Emergencies (UNHCR 1982) as the first document to define minimum standards on the ideal size of a camp, and Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998), being one of the first documents to explore the sociopolitical aspect of camps, or works by researchers who, for the first time exposed issues caused by the uncontrolled expansion of camps, such as the violation of rights of refugees, encouraging the production of articles on normative aspects, and works by authors who began to relate refugee camps to the urban universe. Many other works, not referenced in this paper, were equally relevant in portraying the development of refugee camps, but could not be mentioned because of text size constraints.
Literature and related historical and literary facts are presented through a chronological account, starting with the first documents on the subject, and advancing to more recent works. The narrative is divided into periods, according to significant changes in history, aligned with changes in writing style. Each selected document is presented through the description of its content and contribution to knowledge about the evolution of refugee camps. An overview is provided at the end of each period.
Bibliometric Analysis
The bibliometric analysis adopted SCOPUS as the database to collect information on publications during the period from 1900 to 2021. The search query, chosen to reflect the primary purpose of this investigation, had the following parameters: [TITLE-ABS-KEY (“refugee camp”) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (“emergency settlement”) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (“humanitarian settlement”) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (“emergency camp”)] AND [EXCLUDE (SUBJAREA, “MEDI”)]. In total, 2,620 documents were found.
The performance analysis on works published throughout the decades, represented in Fig. 1, illustrates the growth in the number of documents published per year, demonstrating a substantial increase in interest in the topic, especially from the year 2000.
The performance analysis on documents per subject area, represented in Fig. 2, illustrates the diversity of topics in which refugee camps are currently being investigated, demonstrating the high level of consideration in research and complexity of the object of study.
The science mapping technique, which was also part of the bibliometric analysis, was performed using citation analysis and coword analysis.
The citation analysis presented some of the most influential publications on the researched topic. Their impact was measured by the factor number of citations, associated with the same SCOPUS database. The documents with the highest number of citations were Ramadan (2013) with 263 citations, Diken and Laustsen (2005) with 229 citations, Agier (2002) with 208 citations, Peteet (2009) with 207 citations, Horst (2006) with 174 citations, Hilhorst and Jansen (2010) with 139 citations, and Turner (2015) with 138 citations. Simon Turner had the highest number of published documents from the SCOPUS database, directly related to refugee camps, with 10 publications.
The coword analysis was done through VOSviewer software, using the 100 most commonly repeated keywords in publications of the same SCOPUS database to demonstrate their co-occurrence. The outcome, illustrated in Fig. 3, presents a visualized network map using those words, highlighting the connections from the word refugee camp. The colors relate to the different cluster groups. The analysis confirms a scarcity of investigations focusing on the spatial development of refugee camps throughout time, demonstrating a need for more research in that field.
Refugee Camp Literature: An Introduction through Exploration of Practical and Operational Aspects
The term refugee is not new. One of the first groups of displaced people considered refugees was the Huguenots, who fled France in the late 17th century because of religious persecution (Gwynn 1985). Other historical events, such as the revolutions that affect European countries in 1848, and the immigration of Jews escaping from the pogroms of south-western imperial Russia at the end of the 19th century, also brought the idea of refugee to the surface; however, the concept of a refugee camp, as it is known nowadays, is relatively recent. Some of the first camps set up for that purpose appeared between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, during the Cuban War for Independence (1895–1898), the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), and the Herero Wars in German Southwest Africa (1904–1907), now Namibia, and with them came the first documents on the topic.
First Published Literature on Refugee Camps (1900–1945)
One of the first materials published about refugee camps was the book The Transvaal Burgher Camps—South Africa (Thomson 1904). The author, Lieut. Col. S. J. Thomson, who was a camp director, narrated through his book the implementation of camps during the Boer war between the British Empire and Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers in South Africa in the first years of the 20th century. The camps, which were more similar to concentration camps, were established to house not only prisoners of war but also refugees trying to escape the widespread violence of the conflict. The book gives an insight into the planning and management of some of the first refugee camps, focusing on technical details of administration, water and sanitation, education, health treatment, and on metrics, such as food ration; however, it makes no reference to social dynamics inside the settlements.
One of the first camps to officially cater to an emergency event was also established at the beginning of the 20th century when informal settlements were created to accommodate the victims of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Most records on those settlements are through photographs; nevertheless, they have been mentioned in a few works of researchers on refugee camps, such as of Davis (1978) and Sinclair (2006), as a reference to what those authors were proposing, compared with what had been previously done.
The period that follows with events such as the First World War (1914–1918), the Russian Revolution (1917), the Ottoman Empire Collapse (1918–1920), and the Second World War (1939–1945) produced millions of forcibly displaced people, having many of them been accommodated in refugee encampments. Examples of those settlements are Mittendorff in Austria, established in 1915 for Italian refugees, Bourj Hammound in Lebanon, established in 1929 to house Armenians escaping genocide in their country, and Föhrenwald in Germany in 1945, which operated to accommodate displaced persons waiting for resettlement after the end of the wars. Most of the camps established in that period were either informally implemented or had a short life span, and thus, no relevant literature about their planning and functioning could be found during this investigation.
Institutionalization of Humanitarian Assistance to Refugees (1945–1969)
Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, the United Nations (UN) was established, and with it the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation, which was replaced 2 years later by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). In 1949, following the Arab–Israeli conflict, a UN General Assembly established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The UNHCR, which is the institution responsible for the management of most of the refugee camps currently open, was founded in 1950 to succeed IRO. At that time, these humanitarian organizations focused mostly on solving the situation of refugees through either resettlement in a new country, voluntary repatriation to their homeland, or local integration in their place of refuge. Those strategies led to the prioritization of legal protection through conventions and protocols, instead of shelter protection through the development of projects of temporary settlements; hence, not much significant material about emergency sheltering was produced at that time.
After dealing with Second World War refugees, the UNHCR led efforts to handle people displacement crises caused by conflicts from decolonization events in Africa and Asia, which also produced millions of displaced people. The way in which people reached out for safety on those occasions varied, from settling in the homes of relatives to venturing into urban centers beyond borders; however, many could not travel too far, and several refugee camps were established to shelter those refugees, such as Mayukwayuka in Zambia, Nakivale in Uganda, Rabouni in Algeria, and East Bengali colonies in Calcutta.
The first large-scale humanitarian effort relates to the Nigerian Civil War of 1969, known as the Biafra War. No specific publication reports directly to that event; however, lessons learned from that experience can be found in the book A hero of our time (Shawcross 1995); a bibliography of Fred Cuny, an American disaster relief specialist who participated in many humanitarian projects around the world. According to Cuny, some of the most important lessons from the Biafra War were the need to think of camps through a holistic and cross-sectoral approach and take into account the affected community’s needs and self-support capacity. Here, one can note the first signs of an intention to incorporate a more analytical approach to the discussion through an attempt to highlight the importance of the participation of refugees in decision-making processes.
Rethinking the Planning of Refugee Camps (1970–1979)
After his experience in the Biafra War, Cuny returned to the United States and set up a company called Intertect Relief and Reconstruction Corporation. He and his associates spent the following years developing handbooks on best practices in humanitarian response. The first documents, related to projects that responded to the Nicaragua earthquake in late 1972, and the flood in Bangladesh in 1973, derived from drafts entitled Refugee Camps and Camp Planning (Intertect, unpublished report, 1971). The referred documents are relevant because they introduced a shift in how refugee camps were designed, from a military-style plan with a grid layout to a cluster approach, being the project for the camp in Nicaragua, known as El Coyote, the first example of planned camp with such fabric.
The next main literature on refugee camps was the paper Refugee camps and camp planning: the state of the art (Cuny 1977), which originated from material produced by Intertect in previous years. The article brought the first two designs of model camps, with ideas borrowed from the Garden City movement of the 19th century by Sir Ebenezer Howard, being one of the first clear links between camps and long-lasting settlements. The Garden City movement was a method of urban planning initiated in 1898 by Howard in the United Kingdom, where settlements were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts, containing proportionate areas of residence, industry, and agriculture.
Concomitant to the material from Intertect was the article Space enclosures for emergencies in developing countries (Hartkopt and Goodspeed 1979). The paper contained explicit rationales behind spatial decisions in the layout of camps, showing a transition in the way camps were perceived, from a mere transient emergency settlement to a more permanent structure, by taking into consideration the fact that refugees could possibly spend more time in the camps than expected. An example of this concern is demonstrated in the planning of blocks in a way “… to eliminate impersonal monotony while [enabling] relief administrators to efficiently oversee the camp” (Hartkopt and Goodspeed 1979, p. 449).
The next important work on refugee camps came from Davis (1978), who worked in disaster recovery management since 1972 and published the book Shelter after Disaster. He had previously published the paper Emergency Shelter (Davis 1977). The main contribution of Davis’ work to the planning of refugee camps was the attention to the importance of housing refugees closer to their original homes.
Despite making a substantial contribution to the melioration of camps, when compared with the first formal encampments of the late 19th and early 20th century, documents of this decade missed a significant aspect regarding proposed approaches to camp planning, a reference to specific geographical context.
Normative Approach to Refugee Camp Literature (1980–2000)
The next two decades are marked by the need to standardize the planning and operation of refugee camps through norms and sets of minimum standards as a reaction to mistakes made and lack of attention to human and refugee rights. Many studies written in this period suggest a new way of looking at refugee camps based on lessons learned from previous interventions and informed by ethnographic fieldwork, which exposed those mistakes through articles and reports.
Manuals and Guidelines on Refugee Camp Management
Two large-scale conflicts developed during the 1960s and 1970s had noteworthy repercussions in the early 1980s: the Vietnam War and the war between Ethiopia and Somalia. During that period, a significant amount of refugee camps were built to accommodate people displaced by those two conflicts, bringing international attention to the situation and triggering the next significant change in camp planning, the push for a guiding manual to assist with future events. This drive represented one of the first steps toward consolidating the idea of refugee camps as a viable response to accommodate people in situations of conflict. One of the key recommendations from a seminar organized by UNHCR in 1980 was the creation of a global emergency operations handbook (Kennedy 2008). The first draft of the document, which was prepared by Intertect, became the starting point for the first edition of the UNHCR manual Handbook for Emergencies—a publication that, to this date, guides the implementation of humanitarian assistance to refugees.
One of the main contributions of the draft was the incorporation of minimum standards to regulate the provision of services to refugees. A great issue in humanitarian assistance up to that point in time was the lack of knowledge or experience of agencies and nongovernmental Organisations (NGOs) that dealt with refugees, visibly noted during the response to the Biafra War (Shawcross 1995). The implementation of minimum standards aimed to help humanitarian organizations to provide better services. Some of the standards, related to space had a great influence on the planning of new camps. For instance, the guide recommended 40 m2 overall per person in a camp (Kennedy 2008, p. 101). The document went even further, stating that more important than the standards was the adequacy of the camp’s systems to meet the needs of the residents. The draft also compared camps to long-lasting settlements, stating that “A camp must be planned as though it were a town, with considerations of the same factors” (Intertect, unpublished data, 1980, IV: 4), reminding that camps often lasted longer than expected. The two aforementioned affirmations were left out of the published document and, thus far, the idea of camp as a kind of town or city still encounters resistance.
The first edition of the UNHCR Handbook of Emergencies, which was published only in 1982, contained the definition of what constituted a camp design; “… a potential design for a camp based largely upon the tiling of open-plan shelter cluster modules around a central administrative block …” (UNHCR 1982, p. 106).
Throughout the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Fred Cuny continued to insist on the idea that refugee camps should be considered a type of city and that the potential for some of them to endure should not necessarily be closed off (Cuny and Stein 1990). To this date, the reality of the protracted situation of refugees still seems to be overlooked. Despite being correct at that time, the argument of camps as enduring settlements could not be corroborated because of their relatively short life span. Nowadays, with many camps having life spans of over 25 years (Dantas et al. 2021), there is enough data to confirm the argument.
Other authors exposed problems being witnessed in refugee camps, such as Harrell-Bond (1986). In her book Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees, she analyzed the interchange of power, resources, and ideological conflict among refugee camps’ main actors, such as humanitarian agencies, host governments, local residents, and refugees. Her study focused on assessing the assistance given to refugees concerning their interests, exposing the ineffective and disruptive way in which the organization and delivery of resources were done by international relief programs. Her work helped to question the management of camps and the negative impact caused by their establishment in the surrounding communities.
One of the main contributions of the 1990s to the topic of refugee camps was the publication of the book Engineering in Emergencies (Davis and Lambert 1995), which proposed, among other things, improvements to the arrangement of shelter in camps through alternative community cluster layouts, to foment social interaction among refugees. The narrative did not explore the topic in enough depth though, limiting it to plans and technical specifications.
The next significant contribution of that period came only toward the end of the decade with the publication of the second edition of the manual Handbook for Emergencies in 1998, which introduced alternative types of shelter and increased the number of minimum standard parameters. The preamble of the chapter on site planning still conveyed the unfeasibility of camps by stating that they “… should normally be considered as a last resort” (UNHCR 1998, p. 134). In that same year, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben provided a different perspective on refugee camps in his book Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998), leaving aside their physical aspect and concentrating on the sociopolitical instead. For Agamben, camps were places of exclusion with a hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living—an integral part of human society and the biopolitical paradigm of social life. His take on the subject, from a political angle, opened the door for other scholars to explore camps beyond their operational and normative facets.
Another relevant work published in that year was the article Refugee camps reconsidered (Crisp and Jacobsen 1998). In the article, the authors expose issues in the assumptions made by people against camps; for instance, that self-settled refugees were in better conditions than those in organized settlements, and that refugees were forced to settle in a camp, demonstrating that those assumptions were incorrect. They also provided practical steps to address problems raised by anticamp people, such as that host governments should be encouraged to follow international standards and be supported, through advocacy and training, to implement those standards in the management of camps and to prepare for future influxes of refugees.
Establishment of Minimum Standards
Although not precisely normative, works from authors such as Harrell-Bond (1986), and Crisp and Jacobsen (1998), as well as many reports from gray literature provided a significant contribution to the understanding of the conditions in refugee camps by highlighting problems, including those related to the human or refugee rights, having influenced the development of documents with normative strategies. One of those documents derived from the Sphere Project—a consortium of representatives of the largest humanitarian organizations, created as an answer to problems that occurred during the response to the Rwandan crisis of 1994–1995. The project resulted in the publication of a document entitled Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards for Disaster Response (Sphere Project 2000). The main aim of Sphere, as it is best known, was to introduce considerations of quality and accountability to humanitarian response. Its set of values and core standards has become highly respected by the humanitarian community.
Continuing on the trend of the 1970s, most of the literature produced between 1980 and 2000 still concentrated mostly on physical parameters and minimum standards. Documents were prominently based on observations and field experience. Except for a few exceptions, there was little theoretical support or scientific exploration of social, political, economic, and environmental aspects of camps, and analysis neither explored the cultural characteristics of refugees nor considered geographic features to inform the planning and management of camps.
Interpretative Account of Refugee Camps (2001–2016)
From early 2000, the literature on refugee camps has been marked by a shift in style, from a normative discourse focused on standards and measurements to a more analytical approach, venturing to social, political, economic, and environmental aspects.
Analytical Approach to the Study of Refugee Camps
Embarking on the production of Handbook and Sphere publications at the end of the 20th century, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), one of the largest humanitarian NGOs on camp management, developed in 2004 its own manual, entitled Camp Management Toolkit (NRC 2004), which used terminology similar to cities in their hierarchy of structures, such as neighborhood, camp town, and camp city.
In terms of academic publication, the article Refugee Camp or Cities? The Socio-economic Dynamics of the Dadaab and Kakuma Camps in Northern Kenya (Montclos and Kagwanja 2000) was one of the first materials to relate the politicization of the question about refugee camps to economic sustainability. The article highlighted the importance of political support during the development of camps for residents to have a good standard of living. The authors explore two case studies of settlements in Kenya to present camps as virtual cities and market towns. They also defended urban planning as a way to proceed in the design of camps.
Another academic document of this period was derived from a research center based out of Cambridge University, where an assignment called Shelter Project was created. That venture resulted in the publication of a book entitled Transitional Shelter—Displaced Populations (Corsellis and Vitali 2005). The book deconstructed the establishment of refugee camps by dividing their development into five phases: assessment; planning; execution; monitoring; and evaluation. It also mentioned critical considerations that should be taken during their planning phases, such as environment and climate, demographics, vulnerability, and even funding cycles. Besides containing this valuable classificatory information, the publication is also significant because it is one of the first examples of literature in which camps are considered not as temporary but transitional settlements, an important step in their future consideration as enduring. Here, the authors recognize the possibility of refugee camps being the transient stage to a consolidated settlement and highlight the need for a contingency plan for later expansion. The book also emphasized the importance of community development as a way to mitigate the negative impacts of living in a camp.
In that same year (2005), the book The Culture of Exception—Sociology Facing the Camp (Diken and Laustsen 2005) was published. Its authors depicted camps as the rule in contemporary society, representing both the old fear of enclosure and the new dream of belonging instead of being perceived as an anomaly and exceptional site situated on the margins of society. Like Agamben, its authors surpassed the physical aspects of camps to dive deep into their social aspects.
A few literature contributions on refugee camps of this period derived from ethnographic work. In the early 2000s, Julie Peteet developed studies on Palestinian refugee camps, which have significant differences from isolated camps in Africa but also have many similarities. The work was translated into the book Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps (Peteet 2009), which explored the relationship between place and identity in the context of a refugee camp and the paradoxical condition of an environment that is associated with poverty and marginalization as much as it is with remarkable creativity. Another example of literature derived from ethnographic work came from Cindy Horsts, an anthropologist who carried out extensive fieldwork among Somalis in Kenya refugee camps between 1995 and 2001, publishing the book Transnational, Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya (Horst 2006). Her book has a strong social connotation, providing an understanding of how refugees residing in camps develop social networks in and out of those settlements and how they adapt their personal and social heritage in a new enclosed environment.
In the following year, UNHCR (2007) published the third edition of the Handbook for Emergencies, which did not offer any relevant change on the topic of site planning, compared with the previous edition.
In 2008, the results of a Ph.D. dissertation entitled Structures for the Displaced: Service and Identity in Refugee Settlements (Kennedy 2008) were presented during the Twelfth Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IfoU). The dissertation focuses on the refugee camp design process, claiming that despite different circumstances in which camps were developed, be it environment, culture, or cause of its establishment, they had only one design, with some minor variants. Kennedy demonstrated his argument by providing several examples of the use of the same design process in different contexts regarding time and location. His work highlighted the lack of understanding and response to the continuing advancement of refugee camps toward a permanent condition.
In the same year of Kennedy’s presentation, Herz (2008) contributed to the book Urban Transformation with a chapter entitled Refugee Camps or Ideal Cities in Dust and Dirt. The text, which was derived from research developed by him on refugee camps of Chad in Africa, highlighted the lack of consideration of the geographical context or social, legal, and economic aspects in which camps were being implemented. Herz commented on the fact that, to that date, planning discourse remained only on a purely technical level, with an emphasis on a modular planning approach. His comments were pertinent because, up to that point in time, studies on refugee camps were based mostly on physical (morphology) and administrative (operation and performance) components. There was still a paucity of exploration on a socioscientific level.
Five years after his chapter contribution, Herz (2013) published the book, From Camp to City—Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara, in which he questioned the clarity and comprehensiveness of the categorization of refugee camps into either humanitarian spaces, places of control, or places of destitution and misery. Using the case study of refugee camps of Western Sahara, Herz analyzed how politics, geography, economy, and resource availability influenced the daily routine in those camps. He used the study to identify particularities of camps that transcended their similarities to slums or prisons, proposing that they should be seen as political agencies and contributors to people’s emancipation. Instead of focusing on technicalities or using a theoretical framework to analyze camps, Herz tried to understand how refugees created and modified environments, focusing on activities in public spaces and their urban dimensions. He linked the perceived existence of urban qualities of the spaces to the daily routines and cultural development of camp residents, highlighting how certain urban fashions and cultures manifested themselves in the environment and influenced it, and how the physical fabric became the milieu where political aspirations were expressed.
In that same year, the working paper Civitas, polis, and urbs: reimagining the refugee camp as the city (Grbac 2013), also brought to the surface the idea of a refugee camp as a space of paradox, through permanence and impermanence, mobility and immobility, and formality and informality attributes. In addition, the paper presented refugee camps as developing urban environments. For that, Grbac used Lefebvre’s theory of social space to do that association. The work is another example of an attempt to associate camps with cities.
The years that follow are richer in material about refugee camps than previous periods, most likely influenced by a civil war in Syria, which produced millions of refugees and was responsible for the opening of many refugee camps in neighboring countries. The event brought the attention of the international press and scholars, who took an interest in the topic, giving more emphasis to the urban aspects of refugee camps.
One of the researchers who delved into the topic of refugee camps was Romola Sanyal. Her article entitled Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement (Sanyal 2014) explored the politics of space in refugee camps by drawing connections with other spaces of urban marginality such as slums, through case studies of two refugee camps in Lebanon and India. In doing so, she took the opposite strategy of Herz (2013), who distanced his study from that type of comparison. Sanyal saw refugee spaces as quintessential geographies of the modern world, complex spaces that challenge the sociospatial imaginations of academics and practitioners. Her article contributed to the knowledge of camps by offering a vision of them as a new form of political expression.
Another article published that same year, entitled The Urban Planning strategy in Al-Hussein Palestinian Refugee Camp in Amman (Oesch 2014), explored the topic of governance in refugee camps, through the improvement of practices and planning strategies implemented at the Al-Hussein camp in Jordan in previous decades. In the study, the author analyzed the similarities and differences between the interventions in the camp and urban contexts. Two examples used by Oesch were the urban development program and the community infrastructure program, implemented to improve housing conditions in the camp. Those programs were inspired by similar initiatives on urban upgradation and rehabilitation of Jordanian cities, substantiating the argument of similarities between the two realms.
The book Un Monde de Camps (Agier 2014), also published in the same year, encompassed all types of camps, from the oldest to the most recent ones, such as Canaan in Haiti, as well as informal camps, such as The Jungle, a type of camp established on the outskirts of the city of Calais, France. Agier, an Anthropology Professor, gave through his book an insight into the daily routine of those settlements, showing similarities in terms of social interaction between them and urban milieux. He had previously addressed camps as unfinished urbanizations, referring to camp-city as naked city (Agier 2002). In his new publication, he defined camps as places of extraterritoriality, exception, and exclusion, considering them off-places, spaces that transform their inhabitants, as well as the inhabitants of the region where they belong. He also suggested that refugee camps were gradually drawing a new global landscape because of the increasing adoption of this solution by governments and international agencies to accommodate displaced people.
In 2015, Turner (2015) published an article entitled What is a refugee camp? Explorations of the limits and effects of the camp, in which he elaborated on Agier’s definitions of camp as places of extraterritoriality, exception, and exclusion to incorporate three other dimensions: places of opportunity, places of political contradiction, and place of precariousness. For him, opportunity resided in the fact that despite life in camps being reduced to bare temporary survival, it still offered possibilities for the development of new identities through a new social order. Political contradiction resided in the fact that camps are depoliticized at the same time that they are hyperpoliticized, and precariousness arises from the lack of defined leadership because of governance juxtaposition between humanitarian institutions and host countries. Turner argued that the aforementioned ambiguities were formed by a new way of living, in which camps drive refugees. He saw those ambiguities as distinctive attributes of camps. The new dimensions proposed by Turner were valuable insights into a refugee camp and contributed to the improvement of their image as objects that were worth studying, opening the door for new research to improve the understanding of the impact of those dimensions in the daily routine of refugees.
In the same year of the publication of Turner’s paper, the journal City: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action brought an article entitled Durable camps: the State, the Urban, the Everyday (Picker and Pasquetti 2015). Like Sanyal and Agier, Picker and Pasquetti started the article by highlighting the growing trend of featuring camps as social landscapes across the world. The authors alluded to the need for an interdisciplinary debate on the study of camps, including Geography, Sociology, and Social Anthropology, calling for an urban scholarship on camps. An important aspect of their article was the reinforcement of the consideration of the permanent condition of camps to produce better planning. Another significant suggestion made by the authors was the use of refugee camps in the conceptualization of camps in general, through the statement that “Refugee camps are currently the key sites for theorizing camp formation” (Picker and Pasquetti 2015, p. 685).
The other two papers published that year related camps to the discipline of Geography. The paper, What is camp? Legitimate refugee lives in spaces of long-term displacement (Feldman 2015) presented refugee camps as anomalous geopolitical spaces and investigated how legitimacy is produced in those places. The paper, Geographies of the camp (Minca 2015), offered a reflection on camps as a contemporary institution and a spatial bio-political technology and called for the incorporation of camp studies into the broader field of political geography. The two aforementioned articles propose a geographical reflection on camps, a new consideration for this type of settlement. The interest of geographers in the subject of informal settlements for the displaced represents an expansion in the awareness of the subject into other disciplines, which had not previously happened because of the transient characteristic of camps.
Besides geography, other aspects such as health became points of discussion about refugee camps. A paper presented at the 2015 Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in Canada (Byler et al. 2015) discussed the improvement of health outcomes through the reviewing of camp design standards. According to the authors, the standard used during that time for their planning had an impact on the delivery of aid services and the incidence of disease, through the inadequate physical organization advancement of those settlements. The article also identified design components to be prioritized to maximize intended health benefits.
The following year, the article The Protracted Refugee Camp and the Consolidation of a Humanitarian Urbanism (Jansen 2016) brought attention to the increasing association between urbanization and the consolidation of refugee camps by academics. Jansen argued, however, that this analogy was rather ambiguous. On the one hand, was the existence of camps as permanent humanitarian governance; on the other hand, was the flexibility in the way refugees built their lives inside the camps. For him, the regulation and control that characterized camps distanced them from urban settlements. For this reason, he suggested that camps should be understood rather as humanitarian urbanism. The author’s designation of refugee camps as humanitarian urbanism seems quite plausible. However, after one peels the layers of cities and camps, it can be noted that both have control mechanisms that might be different in manifestation but are quite similar in essence. Ethnographic fieldwork on camps has actually shown that, due to the lack of planning rules and regulations, and oversight on layout change, refugees have, in some ways, more freedom to change their environment than city dwellers (Dantas 2015). This argument is confirmed by Jansen’s affirmation that camps are remarkably creative and resilient places through the association of the uniqueness of camps to the distinctiveness of their layout after consolidation.
Another article published in that same year also elaborated on the perpetuation of refugee camps (Chkam 2016), an issue that was starting to attract more attention from researchers. The central argument of the paper was that, by taking a leading role in the administration of camps, foreign humanitarian agencies were partially responsible for the continuity of encampments. In a way, the reasoning given by the author relates to the observations made in the 1970s by Cuny regarding the self-support capacity of refugees (Shawcross 1995), or in the 2000s by Corsellis and Vitali (2005), who emphasized the importance of community development in the camps, and more recently with the attention paid by several researchers to the creativity and resilience of refugees. All those observations point to the need for re-evaluation from humanitarian institutions on how refugee camps are seen and managed.
Also in 2016, the article Impact of Refugee Camps on Their Environment: A Case Study Using Multi-Temporal SAR Data (Braun et al. 2016) explored the changes in landscape related to refugee camps as a reflection of their growing impact on the environment through the degradation of surrounding landscapes over time. The paper is a good example of the environmental studies discipline that, together with Geography, brought another layer of knowledge to the subject.
As noted through the analysis of written materials published since 2001 on the topic of refugee camps, the period is marked by two distinct approaches: one focusing on providing a new conceptualization for this type of settlement and another on looking at ways to improve the standard of living in those places by rethinking strategies for their planning and management. In both approaches, quantitative parameters and minimum standards are no longer the main focus of attention. Instead, political, economic, environmental, and social aspects have emerged as the frontrunners of the analysis. Disciplines such as Geography and Health have also started providing input on the topic of refugee camps. More emphasis has been given to the enduring aspects of camps and their similarities with urban realms.
Contemporary Analysis of Refugee Camps (2017–2022)
In recent years, technology and multidimensional approaches found their way into the study of refugee camps. In 2017, the conference paper Technologies in the planning of refugee’s camps (Daher 2017) presented computational design as a valuable technological resource to the response of temporary housing. The author provides in the article a framework for spatial camp planning based on a parametric computational approach, using Rhinoceros 3D (version 5) and Grasshopper (version 2.1.1) software. The objective is to optimize space configuration by taking into consideration multiple criteria and refugee requirements.
Another article, which has explored spatiality through a technological approach, is the paper We were building a camp, they were building a city (Cutini and Buonocori 2017). In this paper, the authors highlight the spontaneous transformation of camps layout as a confirmation of the relationship between spatial features and behavioral patterns. They also question the compatibility of the current response strategy to refugee accommodation, which uses standardized planning for a settlement that is destined to evolve. Cutini and Buonocori use Space Syntax tools to analyze the relationship between spatial elements in a case study on the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to understand the behaviors of its inhabitants. The result is the proposal of a configurational approach through a basic spatial layout, which allows a spontaneous development process in refugee camps. The article is one of the first works to offer a comparison between a camp and a city located in the same region, in terms of spatial structure and functional features.
The aforementioned articles represent a new paradigm in camp analysis with the application of an innovative methodology such as visual programming for the planning of camps and space syntax to investigate transformations that occur within them. The latest studies on refugee camps do not focus only on the technology though. Previous studies are also re-evaluated by researchers, in a search for a more accurate conceptualization of refugee camps. An example of this research approach is the article The Refugee Camp as a Space of Multiple Ambiguities and Subjectivities (Oesch 2017), which elaborates on the conceptualization of exception from Agamben to reconsider the idea of camp as a zone of indistinction between exclusion and inclusion. For him, camp dwellers are autonomous and productive entrepreneurs and consumers. He also differentiates camps from cities by depicting them as spaces of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities, which represents a more general principle of governing camps. Oesch believes that camps differentiate from one another, depending on the geopolitical aspect, just as cities and towns do.
Another aspect of camps explored by researchers has been Economics. The article Economic Life in Refugee Camps (Alloush et al. 2017) compares the ramifications of giving food aid versus cash to refugees, a practice that is being investigated as a way of promoting refugees’ self-reliance and the development of the region where the camp is located. The study has found that economies arise inside both scenarios and the structure of these economies reflects the economic context around the camps; however, the cash aid “… appears to increase refugee welfare while strengthening market linkages between camp and host economies” (Alloush et al. 2017, p. 334). The strategy of providing cash represents an attempt to make refugees more self-reliant, as a sign of a possible consolidation of the camp, as well as a way to reduce the intervention of humanitarian institutions. The increase in the number and size of refugee camps in the last decade is hindering the provision of appropriate aid services by those institutions to all in need.
Most recently, another article published in an urban planning journal (Dalal et al. 2018) explores planning innovations in refugee camps by questioning their effectiveness and benefits. The authors conclude that those interventions result in ambivalent outcomes in the form of camouflaged control and reduction in the input of refugees regarding the transformation of space under an apparent well-intended and sensitive planning.
Another work published recently on the analysis of new approaches to refugee camps design is the article Approaches to the design of refugee camps (Jahre et al. 2018). For its authors, a new approach is implemented only to a limited extent and mostly in a gradual manner. New camps are still established using traditional methods, lacking in participation of refugees in decision-making processes and considering them as temporary settlements that need to be isolated from other communities.
One of the latest works on refugee camps is the book From Shelters to Dwellings: The Zaatari Refugee Camp (Dalal 2022). Being a displaced person himself, Dalal analyzed in his book the difference between sheltering and dwelling, and the spatial transformations that occurred in Zaatari Camp, Jordan, from the changes undertaken by its residents. Here, the shelter has another dimension in the context of spatial analysis, not only regarding its structure but also the influence that it brings to the immediate surrounding.
The latest years are marked by a mixed way of analyzing refugee camps. There has been an emphasis on technology and empirical analysis, as a way of rethinking the planning and assessment of refugee camps through the return to a more quantitative focus. On the other hand, theoretical approaches still have their space in the study of refugee camps with the reconsideration of concepts offered by some of the first scholars who saw them beyond numbers and provoked social, political, and economic discussions.
Discussion
First, the analysis of literature as a body of knowledge, presented in this article, revealed the trajectory that written materials on refugee camps have taken over the decades, from practical and operational connotation to normative style, and most recently to analytical approach, as an indication of their complexity and endurance as settlements.
Second, the complexities now recognized in refugee camps, not only on logistics but also on socio, political, economic, and environmental terms support the argument that they have indeed become enduring human habitats, reinforcing the idea that refugee camps should no longer be assumed as temporary settlements.
That recognition ought to be the catalyst for changes in the way refugee camps are planned and managed, moving away from basic and rigid structures to incorporate flexible features, foresee expansions, and take into consideration the needs of its residents to live in an environment with long-lasting structure, which addresses not only their basic needs but also cultural ones. Without such changes, camps are fated to continue to be seen as places of misery and hopelessness.
Third, the analysis also revealed that, despite the latest efforts to investigate refugee camps on a deeper level, there is still some lack of knowledge on the subject. A common attribute identified in the analysis of documents about this research was that most of them focused on either political, economic, social, health, geographic, or governance aspects. An overarching approach to the examination of camps, which incorporates correlations between the aforementioned dimensions, could afford a more holistic conceptualization of this type of settlement.
Another aspect missing in the rationales of camps as urban realms, new global landscapes, or consolidated settlements is their validation through statistical analysis. This lack of empirical substantiation is actually mentioned by many scholars and writers on refugee camps, who state that the topic is still underexplored. The application of systematic analysis of quantifiable data can corroborate, for instance, the affirmation that some camps have indeed consolidated into enduring settlements.
The authors argued that the planning of refugee camps must take a long-term perspective; however, new strategies will succeed only when the lessons learned from the process by which they evolve are implemented.
Conclusion
This investigation has exposed the advancement of refugee camps throughout time, from the point of view of scholars and institutions, demonstrating their endurance and progress, and confirming the statement that they should no longer be assumed temporary, one-dimensional settlements.
The surge in publications on refugee camps of the past decade coincides with an increase in the number of significant events that caused the forced displacement of a large population and consequent uncontrolled mass migration. It is anticipated that, with the increasing trend in the number of forcibly displaced people, many more guides, articles, dissertations, and books will be produced on the topic in the years to come.
Following on the normative approach of the initial works and the analytical approach of the last 20 years, this study anticipates that the forthcoming literature on the topic will represent a third level of investigation on camps, informed by their complexity, which is engendered by their size, density, and life span, demanding a more comprehensive approach that takes into consideration the intricacy of the various systems that constitute camps.
More in-depth emerging studies of the hosting countries of refugee camps can lead to the adoption of a more humanistic approach in which public entities develop a sustainable urbanistic and social intervention.
Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Volume 149 • Issue 4 • December 2023
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Received: Aug 15, 2022
Accepted: Jun 30, 2023
Published online: Aug 11, 2023
Published in print: Dec 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Jan 11, 2024
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