Paper presentation

Being a migrant in an intended temporary arrangement like a refugee camp has become a permanent situation for the worlds increasing number of refugees. Many camps have become ghettos and a part of the urban fabric. Although politically still considered temporary, the inhabitants are left as stateless non-citizens in transit for generations. Palestinian refugee camps are among the oldest camps in the world. The prospect of resolving the background conflict is evidently poor. There are numbers of politically charged reasons for not resolving the problem of the camps, as the camps and the claim for a right to return are at the core of the conflict. Consensus of the discourse has been to avoid permanency in the physical surroundings as this has been regarded as equivalent to not renouncing the claim for return. A shift in this discourse is described by sociologist Sari Hanafi and architect Philipp Misselwitz, emphasizing the connection between the built environment and camp governance. Developmental projects with new approaches to planning are now being tested. The West Bank based architecture studio Decolonizing Architecture considers their involvement in refugee camp projects as a possibility to speculate on how new societal forms can emerge from the camps exceptional situation. A backdrop for understanding the Palestinian refugee identity is given by the ethnographer Julie Peteet, examining how life in exile produces new relationships between identity and place. Looking into the case of Palestinian refugee camps, I will describe a connection between consciousness of a fundamental affiliation to a place that is lost and the production of a space that is politically temporary but de facto permanent. Can these places become laboratories for new approaches to how to deal with the political conflict - alongside urbanization of the camps and the increasing number of refugees?