What are the options for any government seeking to house new refugees? Surveying examples from activist-run squats in Athens to huge refugee camps in Jordan, Tom Scott-Smith looks at what works – and what doesn’t. More fundamentally, he considers: what is shelter, in the end? 

Refugee shelter is a sensitive political issue. Migration policy raises contested questions about membership and fairness in any political community, intensified by pressure on accommodation places and the expense of processing and housing new arrivals. In Britain, there has been particular tension over the asylum backlog combined with the need to shelter people for long periods while their claims are heard. The controversy over the Bibby Stockholm barge in Weymouth and the enormous expense of providing hotel accommodation testifies to the problems surrounding refugee shelter as a political issue.

Yet there are many options for any government or aid agency seeking to intervene and over recent years we have seen a range of strategies to meet the housing needs of new refugee arrivals. In some places refugees have been sequestered in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have been hosted in renovated office blocks, disused warehouses, converted shipping containers and private rentals. Refugees have also erected their own tents and built temporary shelters from tarpaulin and waste wood in places like the Calais Jungle. In many instances, refugees end up living in prefabricated shelters, flown in from abroad and erected in their hundreds by international humanitarian agencies.

In the aftermath of the 2015 “summer of migration”, described by Amnesty International and the UN Refugee Agency as the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, the question of the design of refugee accommodation came into focus – with a range of potential solutions from architects and designers unfurled on the vast canvas of the 2016 Architecture Biennale in Venice.

In the wake of this accommodation crisis, and the architectural response, I began a project to investigate a series of questions. How were refugees being accommodated in different countries? What worked, and what didn’t? And more philosophically: what is shelter in the end? I present the results of this work in a new book, Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter.

The harms of neglecting everyday autonomy

The book focuses on seven examples which capture the diversity of refugee housing, from huge refugee camps in Jordan, to activist-run squats in Athens and a striking inflatable refugee shelter in Paris known as the “Yellow Bubble”. The book argues that, amidst all the excitement surrounding the possibilities of design, one thing has been consistently neglected: the importance of autonomy. I define autonomy as the ability to take control of small, everyday matters, such as what to eat and when to go to bed, without having them imposed from on high.

There was a tendency to restrict decisions over issues that could easily be granted to inhabitants

This was the recurring concern in all the refugee shelters I visited. There was a tendency to restrict decisions over issues that could easily be granted to inhabitants.  This was particularly clear in Germany, where I studied the fate of renovated buildings that were rich in history, including the former Stasi headquarters in Lichtenberg, the buildings of Dachau concentration camp, and the enormous Nazi-built Tempelhof Airport in Berlin: huge buildings with lots of internal space that were converted into large dormitories for refugees by adding bunk beds and internal dividing walls.

In these shelters a wide range of rules and regulations shaped what refugees were able to do. Everyone’s day had to be structured in the same manner, with fixed, catered mealtimes, no facilities for cooking, and overhead lights turned on and off at the beginning and end of the day. Rooms were shared with scores of other people, and there were security guards at every door to keep order. There were no ceilings to the bedroom cubicles which meant a constant background noise that had a serious effect on mental health.

Refugees kept saying that the thing they wanted most, the crucial element of shelter that was lacking, was the ability to control their own space. This issue applied across the board. Refugees and asylum seekers have already lost control over so much, living in a state of perpetual uncertainty about their future, so the lack of choice about food, interrupted sleep, constant noise, and uncontrollable lighting might seem like small irritations, but they became more serious over time. The central issue, then, is lack of control over the most minute areas of life. As one member of the staff at Tempelhof put it, “We’re talking about people who didn’t switch on a light for two years.” Or one refugee told me that what she wanted most was her own door, which she could close and a place she could call her own.

Placing autonomy at the heart of shelter

The thing that should define what shelter means, I concluded, is autonomy. At its heart, shelter should be a place that people can control, a place where people can pick up the pieces of their lives and make choices – however limited – about what comes next. Instead of seeing shelter as an opportunity to provide protection, it should be seen as an opportunity to provide much-needed autonomy in situations that seem deliberately designed to restrict it. This can be advanced in small ways even if the bigger questions of status and membership remain unresolved.

By facilitating autonomy, governments and aid agencies can help refugees respond to local conditions and the particularities of their own situation. At its fullest extent, putting autonomy at the heart of refugee shelter means providing asylum seekers with the resources – both cash and practical support – to find accommodation that suits them best. This may in fact be cheaper than the vastly expensive hotels that are currently being provided for asylum seekers, but governments understandably fear giving away control in the face of a hostile press and public, and would be concerned about the optics of providing money directly to refugees.

Yet there are alternatives. One is to provide shelters with fewer rules and greater freedoms, encouraging designers to step back and provide resources that empower refugees rather than designing shelters from the top down. Before even creating a new shelter there are two central questions that designers might ask: first, does this proposal offer a chance for refugees to truly control their daily conditions and routines? And second, does this shelter maximize the ability of inhabitants to choose between different futures and carve out a distinctive life of their own? For humanitarian designers, this may mean greater humility, learning that the best approach to solving shelter – ironically – may be not to build anything at all.

Tom Scott-Smith will talk about refugee housing, humanitarian design and the politics of shelter at an LSE event on 19 November 2024. Click here for more details about attending this event in-person or online.

Fragments of Home, published by Stanford University Press, is out now.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

Image credits: All images © University of Oxford / Mark E. Breeze. Banner image shows the Azraq camp in Jordan as an example of the mass camp model of shelter.