Review. Tom Scott-Smith, Fragments of Home. Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter.
How can a shelter fulfil our basic human needs? How do we decide what those basic needs are? What works to house refugees in different emergent and geographic contexts? Drawing on detailed ethnographic research, Fragments of Home starts in the Jungle in Calais: the tents and tarpaulin, pallets and plastic sheeting, the camp within a camp of constructed shipping containers. The chapters which follow introduce us to the material realities of shelter across Europe and the Middle East, from IKEA flatpack to huts planned for desert camps, to the occupation of existing structures to create shelter and their adaptation, ending back in France with Paris’ Yellow Bubble. Scott-Smith begins with the material design and construction of shelters that accommodated refugees in the 2010s, asking what worked, what didn’t, and what shelters needed to afford their occupants . But, as he makes clear, shelter is more than bricks, wood, and plastic: a basic human need, a social practice as well as a material one, ‘in buildings but also in human relationships’ (10). How can shelter be made to account not only for health and physical needs, Scott-Smith asks, but also social, economic, cultural, and creative needs?
The substance of the book turns to the ways humanitarians and designers have approached the problem and politics of shelter for refugees. Across the book’s seven chapters, Scott-Smith demonstrates instances and attempts driven by competing forces, providing shelter ‘in a way that tends to be partial and fragmented’ (17). In Chapter One, the IKEA funded Better Shelter was deemed a game changer in design and flexibility, offering something more solid than a tent for those in transition, but could it fulfil a brief for a universal emergency shelter? What would “universal” even look like for vastly distinct cultures and climates? No wonder the UNHCR was reluctant to get specific in briefing IKEA in their partnership. In practice, in its first outing in Dollo Ado in 2013, the shelter was criticised for being both too little, in its limited space and simplistic design, and too much, in the high costs and complexities of its construction . In Chapter Two, the demands on Azraq refugee camp, on the edge of Jordan, were for something much more expansive, a checklist of infrastructure to provide all necessities, as well as offer more control than Za’atari, where refugees altered and recreated the space. But in reality, Scott-Smith describes an uncanny, nearly-dead space where the only glimpses of creativity and life were kept to inside private spaces. Though one UNHCR worker described the camp as a ‘dream’ for monitoring and evaluation, it came at the cost of freedom and expression.
In the squatting of City Plaza in Athens from 2016, ‘solidarity humanitarianism’ and the political act of shelter were evident (69), yet the entanglement with politics led to their prioritisation over protection, as Scott-Smith discusses in Chapter Three. In Chapter Four, Lebanon’s no-camp policy created a diversity of shelter types, with collective shelters like warehouses, subdivided buildings including barns and schools, and informal tented settlements, scattered across the map. As a result, ‘shelter became a matter of tactics’ (83): refugees finding what they could, landlords profiting, humanitarian organisations and aid workers left to fill gaps rather than transform. ‘Pragmatic’ choices in Berlin, as analysed in Chapter Five, repurposing abandoned buildings like Tempelhof Airport, instead created lasting problems with bathroom facilities, privacy, food, noise, and lighting: tolerable, perhaps, for a short time, but damaging for those waiting for weeks, months and years.
The final two chapters consider both poetics and aesthetics in the design of shelter, the ambition to work with what is practical and necessary and that which is relational, collaborative and beautiful. Architects reworking office space in Vienna to house refugees emphasised flexibility and meaningful connection, whether in social furniture or self-build pods, to create shelter on a small scale, through objects. Paris’ Yellow Bubble (2016-18) was intended as a highly visible declaration of hospitality and welcome. But the politics behind the symbol troubled the unconditionality of welcome, not least the desire to get migrants off the streets of Paris. ‘To use Derridean language again, such hostility and hospitality are locked together’ (146).
A preoccupation by humanitarians and designers with grand ideas, whether the flatpack basics, metrics and measurements, political action or navigation, pragmatics, poetics, or aesthetics, often leaves out a key element: what refugees themselves think is most important in fulfilling this basic need. The proposition that Scott-Smith makes at the end of the book is for the prioritization of refugee autonomy. Rather than consultation or feedback, we should instead ‘ask refugee inhabitants what they need rather than trying to imagine human requirements in the abstract’ (158). This autonomy has consequences not just for shelter but for humanitarians more broadly as a foundation to action.
Tom Scott Smith’s book is beautifully written and hugely engaging, deftly and evocatively weaving his own experiences of travelling to these sites and his conversations with humanitarians, designers, and refugees into his analysis of these forms of shelter. It is certain to be of interest to all those concerned with the future of emergency and humanitarian response and the stakes of refugee autonomy. But what for those of us who also look back to the past? As he acknowledges, the perpetuation of inequality and the neglect of recipients’ agency is not a new phenomenon in the history of humanitarianism and aid. Instead, Scott-Smith offers us new modes through which to examine the compromises of the past. As historians increasingly examine the space of refugee camps, their previous uses, and their environments, we should think too about the politics and poetics of shelter and its various design.
