FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Designing homes for the homeless

It starts with a plastic tarp, a woven polyethylene sheet, blue on one side and white on the other, about 18 square meters. Propped up on sticks or simply draped over whatever can be found, this becomes a dwelling; generally, four to six people are expected to live there.

Sometimes there are tents, though usually only enough for the most vulnerable - unattached women with children, for example. The tents measure about 16 square meters, or 170 square feet, and they, too, are meant to hold four to six: a family, or at least a household.

A cluster of 16 households makes a community; 16 communities form a block; 4 blocks are a sector; and 4 sectors are a camp. Four to six people in a flimsy structure measuring 13 feet by 13 feet, and next to them another, and then another, on to the horizon, a sea of blue and white forming a dense metropolis for displaced people.

There are scores of such camps dotting the surface of the planet, from Afghanistan to Poland, Burundi to Thailand, in Serbia, Nepal, Iran and Cambodia, a sort of semi-sovereign archipelago spread out around the world, managed by the United Nations and sustained by nongovernmental organizations. The people who live there are refugees, noncitizens confined to ad hoc cities, perhaps the purest form of a growing and global phenomenon: makeshift architecture, last-ditch living, emergency urbanism.

According to the UN, a refugee is anyone who has crossed an international border to escape persecution, and there are about 10 million of them worldwide, 14 million if you include Palestinians (who are considered a special case). The numbers are rough, though, and the definition is vague: a forced migration can be caused by anything from war to famine, and those who have huddled in some barren sanctuary in their own country - and are therefore officially classified as internally displaced people - are hardly better off than those who have managed to cross a line on a map.

Expanding the definition to include, in effect, everyone on the run who needs help, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees counts a total of 33 million people "of concern." Some have melted into neighboring countries; a great many have effectively disappeared. About 3.7 million make their way into camps.

Few governments want to see large colonies of destitute foreigners perched indefinitely upon their borders. For one thing, it is potentially destabilizing, since whatever conflict brought them there may well spill over; for another, it is a blight. So refugee camps are, in conception and by design, meant to be temporary, and the people who live there are discouraged from settling in.

The official position, then, is that repatriation is always imminent. But refugee crises have a way of lasting much longer than anyone wants to admit, still less to explicitly plan for. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. There have been Afghans stranded in northwestern Pakistan since the Soviet invasion of their country in the late '70s, and Sudanese and Somalis in Kakuma in Kenya since 1992.

This creates a number of problems, among them a sharp rise in overcrowding: a settlement growing at 4 percent a year - standard among displaced people - will almost double in size in 17 years, though the land allotted to them cannot be expected to increase.

The question remains whether there is anything about the design of refugee camps that could make them better. Consider, for example, the basic structure of camps: the tarp, the tent, the cluster, the grid. The fundamental unit assumes that the nuclear family is the basic unit of settlement worldwide, as it is in the Western countries from which most aid workers come. But in many communities, people live among their extended families, their tribes or their clans.

And the grid arrangement, too, replicates European notions of the rational city; it may not serve those cultures that originally organized themselves along more fluid lines. By the same token, Western notions of democratic space - each unit of housing equivalent to the next - may fit our own notions of fairness but prove disruptive to communities that are structured around an implicit or explicit ranking in honor, say, of town elders.

To take another quite simple fact, in some parts of the world people cook outside, while in others they cook inside. Some cultures make more of an issue of privacy, and some less. Some separate women and children from men, and some do not. And so on.

A deeper, if more diffuse, problem is built into the very idea of an encampment. Many refugees skip the camps altogether and make their way into capitals, like the 1.4 million Iraqi refugees who, since the U.S. invasion, have crossed into Syria. In some cases these are urban populations looking for an urban refuge; others are rural people who believe that cities are where the jobs are. Very often they end up homeless and unemployed beyond the UN's help.

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