Inhabiting Displacement: Architecture and Authorship

200 Pages·2022·12.07 MB·English

by  Shahd Seethaler-Wari, Somayeh Chitchian, Maja Momic

Inhabiting Displacement
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Shahd Seethaler-Wari, Somayeh Chitchian, Maja Momić (eds.)
Inhabiting Displacement
Architecture and Authorship
Birkhäuser
Basel
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Acknowledgments
This book is the result of the collective contributions of many people over several years.
Each of those contributions was essential to this book in its own unique way, and with-
out which the book would not have been possible. We would like to use this space to
express our deepest gratitude to all contributors.
Foremost, we acknowledge the inhabitants, meaning the lives and conditions of
those that the contributors of this volume have engaged with on a deep level, those
who made this publication and our thinking possible. Those whose names are not men-
tioned, but who opened up their lives to us, and allowed us to enter. Our aim and aspi-
ration are to write with them, not for or about them, and we hope we have risen to the
occasion. We acknowledge that we only act as intermediaries, struggling to find new
meanings of what research and writing could fundamentally contribute. This book is
not dedicated to them, it has arisen from them.
This work would not have been possible without the support of Prof. Steven
Vertovec, the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Eth-
nic Diversity in Göttingen, which launched the research project “Between Accommo-
dation and Integration: Comparing Institutional Arrangements for Asylum-Seekers”
in February 2017, and concluded it, in January 2019, with the architectural workshop
“Inside Out – Outside In: Shifting Architectures of Refugee (In)habitation.” From the be-
ginning of the project, Prof. Vertovec believed in the importance of architecture and
space in the context of migration and refugee studies, at a time when the surrounding
academic environment was mostly focused on social and political sciences. It is due
to his belief, encouragement, and support that the research project gained spatial and
architectural perspectives, which inspired this volume. In this spirit, we express our
deepest gratitude to the entire staff of the institute; to the administration, the main-
tenance team, the IT team, the library team, the student assistants, and the scientific
staff for their support both throughout the project and in the organization, moderation,
and success of its closing workshop.
Our thanks and gratitude equally go to the Volkswagen Foundation for their gen-
erous support of the above-mentioned research project, its concluding workshop, and
this resulting volume.
We thank the participants of our workshop for their contributions in creating a
platform for all of us to engage in a lively, interdisciplinary, multiscalar, cross-region-
al discussion which, subsequently, inspired this book. A particular thank you to the
authors of this volume for their patience, support, and hard work. Their papers were
written and edited amid a pandemic, in challenging conditions, while juggling family
life and work from home. Their commitment to the project was exemplary!
Last but not least is the unconditional support and care that our families, friends,
and loved ones provided throughout the process, giving us the opportunity to sacrifice
time with them to make this publication possible. Those family members who left us,
came into our lives, became inaccessible due to the pandemic, and those we returned
to for mutual care, all are an important part of this process, and for whom we cannot
be more grateful.
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Introduction
PART I: Inhabiting the “Camp”
24 In, Out, and Beyond the Camp
Samah Al Jundi-Pfaff
36 Reversals: The University and the Camp
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
47 Architecture on the Move: (Re)Creating a Place in a Displaced World
Irit Katz
60 Madafah: Who is Hosting Whom?
The Everyday of Za’atri Refugee Camp and the Architectural Encounter
Aya Musmar
75 Between Securitization, Appropriation, and the Right to Dwell:
A Multiscalar Analysis of Azraq Camp
Ayham Dalal, Petra Heber, and Leticia Palomino
PART II: Inhabiting the “City”
92 Interview with Gregor Brune, a Practicing Architect
by Shahd Seethaler-Wari
104 Inhabiting Refugee Accommodations:
A Comparison of Two Temporarily Transformed Buildings
Shahd Seethaler-Wari
131 Between Inhabitation and Dwelling: (Im)mobilities in Everyday Life
Maja Momić
145 Architecture and Beyond: In / formal Spaces of Urban Refuge – Berlin
Nassim Mehran
160 Displacement, Arrival, and Housing:
The Case of Leipzig (Germany) and Mocoa (Colombia)
Lina Sánchez Steiner
176 Architectures of Displacement:
On the Aesthetics and Politics of Humanitarian Shelter
Romola Sanyal
Epilogue
192 Inhabitation: A Story of Return
Somayeh Chitchian
196
List of Contributors
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Introduction
Shahd Seethaler-Wari, Somayeh Chitchian, and Maja Momić
This co-edited volume builds upon the workshop “Inside Out – Outside In: Shifting
Architectures of Refugee Inhabitation,” held in January 2019 at the Max Planck In-
stitute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.1 The
workshop brought together a group of scholars, architects, urbanists, planners, de-
signers, and sociologists, from both academia and practice, working at the intersec-
tion of architectural spatial research and migration / refugee studies. This workshop
focused on the reciprocal relationship between design, displacement, and practices
of inhabitation, seen through the lens of the shifting and changing architectures of
shelter(ing). Contrary to the architectural disciplinary orthodoxies of permanence and
durability, these architectures are in a constant state of flux, ephemeral, and blatantly
showcasing the impermanences and fragilities of our contemporary conditions. Fur-
thermore, the workshop aimed at challenging the humanitarian, interventionist, and
technocratic understandings of architectural spatial production and its subsequent
dualisms between the figure of the “architect” and that of the “refugee” – putting one
at the giving end and the other at the receiving end of technical expertise and, by ex-
tension, knowledge (Chitchian, Momic, and Seethaler-Wari 2020). This volume builds
upon these ideas and expands them further.
“Crisis” of migration or crisis of the nation-state?
The abovementioned workshop, and this subsequent publication, have undeniably
grown in the European post-2015 context; a context that has been riddled with notions
such as “crisis,” “influx,” “flood,” and “threat” of migrants / refugees. The inherent Euro-
centrism of these discourses is not only evident through the language of crisis – a cri-
sis not in Europe but of Europe (Tazzioli and De Genova 2016) – it distinctly reproduces
Europe’s concomitant fortified geographies through the constant ideological construc-
tion of the Other (that imagined lesser form of humanity, in an oppositional relation
to an Us / the Self) and that outside place of otherness, of fear, and threat (Fanon 1963;
Said 1978; Anderson 1983; Duncan 1993).
The contemporary questions of migration and refuge are foundational to and in-
tertwined with the project of modernity and its particular conceptions of time and
space. According to Arturo Escobar, “the contemporary migrant [and migration] con-
stitutes a historical problematic that embodies in a particularly acute manner the
pasts, presents, and futures of the world known as Western modernity” (2019, 96). In
other words, immigration and citizenship controls are crucial technologies and strat-
egies for the project of nation-making (and nation-maintaining), particularly, as Nan-
dita Sharma puts it, in the Postcolonial New World Order and the territorialized and,
thus racialized, global hegemony of Europe and the United States since the end of
World War II (2020, 3). As Sharma poignantly argues, the separation between, what
she calls, Natives (autochthons) and Migrants (allochthons) is a legacy of imperialism
in both the colonies as in the metropoles and, thus, co-constitutive of the hegemony
of nation-state power (Sharma 2020, 13). This world order fundamentally contains and
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excludes possibilities for decolonized formations through its superstructure, as argued
by Sharma. The frame of national governmentality and biopolitical form of state p ower,
based on the territorial divide of the “people of place” and the “people out of place,” will
always be a colonial one.
From the perspective of imperial metropoles, the geographies of former colonies,
where the majority of displaced populations are both ousted and sheltered, are often
not only marginalized but made invisible. They are marked outside of frames of “cri-
sis” and “state of exception,” which are in particular reserved for imperial metropoles.
This is what Escobar alludes to as normalized and dominant worldwide ways of be-
ing, doing, and knowing, or what he refers to as “onto-epistemic historicity” that has
come to “colonize other historical ways of world-making” (2019, 96). Hence, a critique
of contemporary migration should also “begin with the foundations that gave rise to a
particular conception of nature, liberalism, secularism, secular humanism, anthropo-
centrism, capitalism, and the modern state and much else that modernity developed
as central to its project,” as argued by Hallaq in his critique of Orientalism (2018, 4,
original emphasis).
Thus, the discourse of crisis is not confined to the post-2015 moment alone, nor the
particular condition that made this work and research possible. Rather, the crisis in
question is that of modernity and the modern nation-state altogether; it is the crisis
when a certain order of things (Foucault 1994) starts falling apart, blatant in its mani-
festation, and crudely visible as we write these pages during a global pandemic. In this
framework, it is undeniable to claim the Euro-American centrism of much of modern
frames of knowledge and thought, and its compartmentalization into “disciplines” in
the past two centuries. As Syed Farid Alatas, along with others, has said, the forma-
tion of much of the modern social science disciplines in the context of colonial expan-
sion, and its institutionalization in the imperial metropoles and colonies, have left so-
cial sciences marked with fundamental, limited characteristics.2 Alatas summarizes
these characteristics as: (a) the inability and / or the lack of creativity to look outside
of the Euro-American cultural arena for the generation of knowledge and methods
of analysis; (b) the uncritical adoption of imitation of Western theories and models,
which Alatas refers to as mimesis, and their imposition on non-Euro-American con-
texts; (c) textualism, or rather the assumption of correspondence between a normative
textual reading and reality; (d) stereotyping, or the essentialization and racialization
of modernity’s Other; and finally (e) absence of subaltern voices that lie outside of the
dominated elitist perspective in social science, all contributing, according to Alatas,
to academic imperialism (2000). Hence, the call for “alternative discourses” for decol-
onization, indigenization, de-Orientalization, sacralization, feminist alternatives, and
multiplication of social sciences, or what Alatas refers to as counter-Eurocentric sociol-
ogy (2006), is the more recent manifestation of a longer trajectory of diverse groups of
scholars and thinkers, from a wide range of disciplines, who have been reading, see-
ing, and thinking from / with an elsewhere – outside of the geotemporal frame of West-
ern modernity alone. This book aims to implement this call for alternative discourses
within the modern, institutionalized, and technocentric discipline of Architecture.3
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