Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism

265 Pages·2015·3.615 MB·English

by  Lisa Smirl

About the author
Lisa Smirl was a lecturer in international
relations at the University of Sussex. She
worked previously for the United Nations
Development Programme in Africa, South-
east Europe and Central Asia. A Rhodes
Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, she did
graduate work at the London School of
Economics and completed a PhD at the
University of Cambridge in 2010. Lisa was
from Manitoba, Canada. She died in 2013 at
the age of 37.

SPACES OF AID
HOW CARS, COMPOUNDS AND HOTELS
SHAPE HUMANITARIANISM
Lisa Smirl
Zed Books
London
Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism
was first published in 2015 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London
n1 9jf, uk
www.zedbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Arran Gaunt 2015
The right of Lisa Smirl to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
Set in Monotype Plantin and FontFont Kievit by Ewan Smith, London
Index: [email protected]
Cover image © Juan Vrijdag/Panos
Cover designed by roguefour.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978-1-78360-350-3 hb
isbn 978-1-78360-349-7 pb
isbn 978-1-78360-351-0 pdf
isbn 978-1-78360-352-7 epub
isbn 978-1-78360-353-4 mobi
CONTENTS
Figures | vi Note to the reader | vii
Foreword | viii Acknowledgements | x
Preface |xii Abbreviations | xvi
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
1 Stories from the field, stories of ‘the field’: how aid
workers experience the space of the field mission . . . .20
2 Exploring the humanitarian enclave. . . . . . . . . . . 47
3 How the built environment shapes humanitarian
intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80
4 Building home away from home: post-tsunami Aceh,
and the single-family house . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114
5 Playing house: rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Katrina . 165
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Bibliography | 211
Index | 233
FIGURES
4.1 IFRC transitional shelter, Banda Aceh (author’s own photo,
May 2006) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126
4.2 Example of a post-tsunami house, Banda Aceh (author’s own
photo, May 2006). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
4.3 Example A: floor plan, tsunami house (reproduced with
permission from the UN-Habitat Settlements Recovery
Monitoring Programme) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130
4.4 Example B: floor plan, tsunami house (reproduced with
permission from the UN-Habitat Settlements Recovery
Monitoring Programme) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
4.5 Example of a ‘traditionally inspired’ tsunami house, Banda
Aceh (author’s own photo, May 2006). . . . . . . . . . . 138
5.1 MVRDV’s Concept Bent (© MVRDV; reproduced with
permission from www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/382mirneworleans
conceptbent) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
5.2 Computer-generated screen shots – design by Atelier Hitoshi
Abe (reproduced with permission from www.a-slash.jp/) . . 176
5.3 The KC 308 floor plan (photo credit: Jeff Bounds; reproduced
with permission from Cusato Cottages, LLC website: www.
cusatocottages.com/selectaplan.php#) . . . . . . . . . . 184
5.4 Maison basse floor plan (reproduced with permission from
Upton and Vlach 1986). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
5.5 2732 Orleans Avenue (photograph © Robert Polidori,
reproduced with permission) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
NOTE TO THE READER
This book is based on Lisa Smirl’s PhD thesis, which was suc-
cessfully defended at the University of Cambridge in 2010. She
died before she could publish it. Lisa was a pioneering scholar
of the spatial dimensions of aid and development work, an
area of inquiry which has expanded considerably in recent
years. Her illness and death meant that she could not make
use of scholarship published after 2010, nor could she incor-
porate discussion of events since then. With assistance from
Ken Barlow at Zed Books, and with the advice of Lisa’s friends
and colleagues, we have lightly edited the manuscript for style,
grammar and repetition. Those interested will find additional
papers, data and other material by Lisa at spacesofaid.word
press.com.
Tarak Barkawi, London School of Economics
Anna Stavrianakis, University of Sussex
FOREWORD
When Tarak Barkawi and Anna Stavrianakis asked me to provide a
foreword for Lisa Smirl’s book, Spaces of Aid, I was both honoured
and humbled. To enthusiastically greet the posthumous publication
of a young scholar’s brilliant PhD thesis is not enough. The eloquence
and prescience of Lisa’s book constantly reminds us of our loss.
Praise cannot recoup the intellectual riches that would have been.
That Zed Books is publishing Spaces of Aid, however, has to be
warmly acknowledged. That which Lisa did achieve is now here for
all to see, enjoy and learn from.
I first met Lisa in March 2009, when I gave a talk at the Dep art-
ment of Politics and International Relations (POLIS) at Cambridge
where she was completing her PhD. The title of my seminar was
‘Aid, Architecture and Security in Sudan’. I had been in South Sudan
about nine months earlier completing a consultancy for UNHCR.
While I had been a fairly regular visitor during the civil war, this
consultancy was the first time I’d been back to South Sudan for
nine years. Although peace had been declared in 2005, the most
striking thing in 2008 was the withdrawal of international aid
workers into fortified aid compounds and the restriction of their
movements. Parad ox ic ally, during the war years, internationals
had moved around a lot more freely. My Cambridge talk was a first
attempt to make sense of this counter-intuitive experience through
a tentative exp loration of the spatial dimensions of humanitarian
aid. It was a great delight t herefore to find Lisa in the audience. As
Spaces of Aid shows, through her research she was already there, in
full command of this overlooked but vital intellectual terrain. In the
pub afterwards, I learnt more from Lisa than I could give in return.
Although I only knew her for a tragically short period of time, it
foreword | ix
was clear from the first that I’d met a warm, challenging and strong
woman.
Spaces of Aid is an important book. It’s about the spaces, environ-
ments and material objects of aid. While neglected and taken for
granted, the built environment and material infrastructures that
support international aid - the gated office and accommodation
complexes, the four-wheel drive vehicles, and the exclusive bars
and hotels that international aid workers frequent - circumscribe
experience and influence policy. Spaces of Aid is the first book-length
treatment of the closed environment that has been euphemistically
summarised as Aid Land or the Aid Bubble. Not only does Spaces
of Aid give this ignored but essentially subversive field of research
visibility and coherence, the trend toward securitization that Lisa
describes has, if anything, continued to deepen. International aid
workers are physically remote from the societies through which they
endlessly rotate. By showing how a culture of separation preceded
the securitized hardening of the aid world’s built and engineered
environment, Spaces of Aid is an original and invaluable contribution
to a debate that, in many respects, is only now beginning.
Mark Duffield, Emeritus Professor
Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol