Description
Book SynopsisEnvironments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in
Architecture of Migration, a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refuge
Trade Review“This beautifully written and brilliantly original work elucidates a seemingly irresolvable tension, central to the condition of migrants, between the transience of the refugee category and how refugees’ lives are anchored in hard infrastructures and histories. By tracing the entanglement of aesthetics and politics in the Dadaab refugee camp, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi ties migration to encampment in a visceral and material way.” -- Miriam Ticktin, author of * Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France *
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Architecture of Migration deftly deconstructs humanitarian discourses in architecture, planning, and global crisis management. Its compelling ethnographic research with camp residents and aid workers shares lived experiences within these built-to-be-temporary camps of tents and tarps that have become permanent sprawling urban settlements. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s insightful histories share spatial narratives of lives caught in the wake of colonialism and political, economic, and environmental upheaval. Siddiqi produces an unparalleled study of how neoliberal policies strategically and violently underdevelop spaces for the world’s most vulnerable people.” -- Mabel O. Wilson, Professor of Architecture and Professor of Black Studies, Columbia University
Table of ContentsAbbreviations xiii
Author’s Note xv
Introduction. Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp 1
1. From Partitions 51
2. Land, Emergency, and Sedentarization in East Africa 99
3. Shelter and Domesticity 141
4. An Archive of Humanitarian Settlement 181
5. Design as Infrastructure 249
Afterword. “Poetry Is a Weapon That We Use in Both War and Peace” 305
Acknowledgments 321
Notes 329
Primary Sources 363
References 371
Index 397
