Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra, eds., Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities (New Texts Out Now)

Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra, eds., Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities (New Texts Out Now)

Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra, eds., Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities (New Texts Out Now)

By : Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra

Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities (Routledge, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?

Haim Yacobi (HY): When I was invited by Routledge to edit this book, I hesitated whether or not I could do it. There were several reasons: the first has to do with my own identity; as an Israeli scholar (at that time I was based in Israel), despite my extensive work on urban issues in Israel/Palestine, I was not so sure that, politically, it was the right thing to do. I was also not so sure how intellectually the idea of “Middle East cities” should be approached; in other words, was there any particular argument we could develop in such a book, vis-à-vis the growing literature on Global South urbanism? Finally, I wondered what kind of overall statement this book should develop, as it would be based on fragments of research among different researchers in the Middle East and those working on the region in the Global North. All these obstacles also supported the decision to accept this task; being aware of my positionality and being critical towards the essentialist approach towards the region, while at the same time acknowledging its specific politics, histories, and cultures. 

Mansour Nasasra (MN): Since the Arab Spring in 2011, cities in the Middle East and the Arab world became the key sites of demonstrations and social movements’ bases. Such dynamics brought Middle Eastern cities to the main headlines across the region. The marginalization of small and influential cities in the Middle East motivated us to bring the Middle East city back as a key focus of our research.   

By editing this book, I hoped to bring indigenous and critical perspectives about cities in the Middle East and the Arab world, tracing the recent development of this marginalized field. By bringing together local scholars from the Arab world and elsewhere in the region, we aimed to provide critical perspectives about cities in the Middle East and their influential role in shaping the future of the region.

The book aims to present Middle East cities as both particular and universal ...

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

HY & MN: The book aims to present Middle East cities as both particular and universal, sites of local process originating from specific history and politics, as well as parts of a global urban dynamics. Hence, all chapters are based on case studies, which are framed by different theoretical schools. As editors, we see the urban through an interdisciplinary prism. This is expressed in the variety of disciplines of the authors: geographers, architects, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and so on. The book thus addresses many topics, from urban policy and planning to political economy and memory studies. It refers to different urban communities in cities in the Middle East and it voices our concerns with, for example, the ongoing violence towards Palestinians, Kurds, women, and the LGBTQ community.    

J: How do you see this book contributing to the field of studies of urban issues the Arab world and beyond? 

HY & MN: We see the contribution of the book in two levels; firstly, it offers an in-depth analysis of a variety of cities in the Middle East, including some under-researched cases. Secondly, we believe that producing such a wide scope of themes, and analytical and theoretical approaches produced by scholars from the Middle East and those who spend a significant time in the region, is an essential resource for students and academics interested in cities in the Middle East.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous research?

HY: Most of my work in the last two decades focused on critical urban studies, especially in Israel/Palestine. My work on Jewish-Arab “mixed” cities, Jerusalem as a neo-apartheid city, memory and the built environment, or migration and urban justice, all equipped me in different ways with the theoretical understanding of urban process and, importantly, on the ways in which urban micro-processes are linked to macro-politics of the region.  

MN: My recent work has focused on how the dynamics of power and state-building influence the ways minorities and indigenous peoples interact with the state. I examined Bedouin tribes and the modern state in the Middle East, focusing on the Negev/Naqab Bedouin, Transjordan and Sinai, and the frontiers of empire. I also examined the impact of twenty-five years of the Oslo framework on Israelis and Palestinians, looking at what the agreements and negotiations, economic protocols, and international donors have achieved as well as what they have not. Recently, I have finished new research about the education system in East Jerusalem and the ongoing conflict around the old city of Jerusalem, including the involvement of Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians. I also completed a research project on cities in southern Palestine such as Beersheba, Gaza, Hebron, and al-Madal/Asqalan. My recent focus on cities in southern Palestine/Israel motivated me to broaden my understanding of the contemporary and historical dynamics in the Middle East and the Arab world. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

HY & MN: We hope that readers of this book will include students and researchers from different disciplines who are interested in urban processes in the Middle East. We also feel that many of the chapters are very accessible to people who are not academics, particularly those who are from the region.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

HY: My main current research project, supported by the Wellcome Trust, is "Gaza: The spatio-politics of health, death and life." This research project is in collaboration with Professor Michelle Pace from Roskilde University, and it examines how power, violence, and health are entangled in conflicts zone in general, and in Gaza in particular. The project will document and critically analyze the effect of infrastructure demolition on health in Gaza, especially in relation to access to health services, nutrition, and water. It will also focus on nuanced humanitarian interventions and their effects on health in Gaza, examining emerging and alternative forms of resilience in relation to health among Gaza inhabitants.

MN: My current research project looks at the economic and social history of cities in southern Palestine during the Ottoman and British rule. Social and knowledge exchange relations were established by Bedouins among the cities of Bir al Saba’, Hebron, and Gaza, tracking their assembling and disassembling as they are buffeted by rapid political changes across the first half of the twentieth century. Based on oral history and archival research, I am currently working on colonial policing and the frontiers of empire in Southern Palestine, Transjordan, Sinai, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

 

Excerpt from the book

From the introduction

What is the meaning of a collection of chapters for a book dealing with cities in the Middle East? we asked ourselves few years ago, when invited to edit the Routledge Handbook for Cities in the Middle East. Can one characterise “Cities in the Middle East” as a distinct urban category without falling into an essentialist trap? Is there any justification for generalising the urban processes of various cities located in a region despite their diverse histories, politics and cultures? And finally, what is our role as researchers in de-constructing the modern geopolitical and urban map of the Middle East that has resulted from the post-war European imperialism which actually created the concept? As already noted by Davison in his canonic article “Where Is the Middle East?”:

 … the fact remains that no one knows where the Middle East is, although many claim to know. Scholars and governments have produced reasoned definitions that are in hopeless disagreement. There is no accepted formula, and serious efforts to define the area vary by as much as three to four thousand miles east and west. There is not even an accepted core for the Middle East.

“Where is the Middle East” is indeed a question that is echoed in the recent call by Jazeel for the return of researchers’ involvement in area studies, particularly in the global south, and to the study of the circulation of knowledge production in the various disciplines. Tariq Jazeel argues that not only is the circulation of knowledge production in the various disciplines geographical, but that one should also consider the ways in which knowledge production (and in our case knowledge of the urban) is transplanted into physical settings from where it rearticulates itself ––  a debate which is central for this collection. 

Mainstream urban literature on the Middle East is dominated by an essentialist form of “orientalism” (Serageldin and El-Sadek, 1982), and with a few significant exceptions (Mitchell, 2003; Celik, 1997; AlSayyad, 1996), the cities of the region are usually considered as only marginally touched by globalisation, and as passive objects of these trends (Stetter, 2012). Therefore, the lacuna that forms sets the main objective of this handbook –– namely, to critically explore and conceptualize how, and what kind of urban spaces in different cities around the Middle East are produced, planned, and experienced, not just as geopolitical sites, but also as an epistemological source of knowledge.

Our objectives coincide with the growing critical literature on Middle East politics on the one hand, and the growing centrality of the urban landscapes in the region on the other , all of which are aimed at de-essentialising knowledge production concerning the region. A telling illustration of this critique is manifested in the image on the cover of this book; an art project of Ashekman (http://ashekman.com), a Lebanese graffiti and hip-hop duo who have painted the word salam –– “peace” in Arabic –– across dozens of rooftops in the northern city of Tripoli that is only visible from the sky. Interviewed by Alexandra Talty, the artists, Mohamed and Omar Kabbani, stated that the concept behind this project (named “Operation Salam”) was to show another side of the country beyond war and extremism:

In the media outlets talking about Lebanon, all you hear about is terrorism and extremism, all the negative aspects…  But there’s plenty of creativity, plenty of people trying to live their life… that’s why we used the word salam. I want to change people’s perception of us.

“Operation Salam” might sound like a naïve attempt to re-narrate urban life in the Middle East, yet we see it as a good demonstration of Maria Todorova’s seminal work, which significantly analysed the ways in which the Balkan region was politically constructed within Western culture. Todorova coined the term “Balkanism”, which is also useful for framing for this book, in the way it references a narrow understanding of the region’s politics. According to our reading, some of the key contributions to the literature on the urban Middle East are rooted in a similar “Middle Easternism” approach, by tending to focus on cities in the region as a unique category that is the reversed image of “ordinary” Western cities.  

This book joins this critical view by moving beyond essentialist and reductive analyses of identity, urban politics, planning, and development in cities in the Middle East, and instead offering critical engagement with both historical and contemporary urban processes in the region. In other words, we take the “Middle Eastern City” as a dynamic site of investigation; rather than a given “neutral” category, we approach “Cities” as multi-dimensional sites, products of political processes, knowledge production and exchange, and local and global visions as well as spatial artefacts. Importantly, our attempt is not to idealise urban politics, planning, and everyday life in the Middle East –– which (as with many other cities elsewhere) are also situations of contestation and violence –– but rather to highlight how cities in the region, and especially those which are understudied, revolve around issues of housing, infrastructure, participation and identity, amongst other concerns.

We wish to frame the selected chapters in this book with the discussion advanced by Jennifer Robinson, who claims that viewing all cities as ordinary may gain substantial results, “with implications for the direction of urban policy and for our assessment of the potential futures of all sorts of different cities”. She attempts to develop a post-colonial urban theory that defines new ways of dealing with differences between cities, and her contribution to our discussion lies in questioning given categorizations of cities (e.g. “developed” versus “undeveloped”; “modern” versus “traditional”; “colonial” versus “postcolonial”), and their assumed hierarchies within a global order. Indeed, this book aims to advance a view of cities in the Middle East that goes beyond the current scope of contemporary research which is profoundly limited by certain long-standing assumptions embedded in urban theory; assumptions that propose the fundamental incommensurability of different kinds of cities.  

Throughout this book urbanisation is seen as an economic, political, and socio-cultural complexity, and so is its interaction with urban landscape, urban dwellers, global politics and everyday life. Municipal and state decision-making further shape the nature of urban spaces, and socio-cultural transformations influence perceived notions of the lived space and, in turn, reshape the physical landscape itself. The growth of urban scholarship over the past two decades accentuated the importance of also looking at the complexity of cities in the global south, highlighting the necessity of questioning the liberal, often Western gaze over urban processes, and viewing urban planning from outside its origins in the global centres of power. While such vein of thought is a source of inspiration while dealing with cities in Africa or Asia, research on cities in the Middle East remains fairly limited in scope, with little cross-disciplinary “conversation” among scholars in differing fields that attempts to account for such complexity. 

As a whole, this book is an attempt to acknowledge a more complex notion of urbanity in the Middle East, and rather than highlighting monolithic characteristics, trends and transformations associated with cities in the region, we suggest diversified approaches that avoid the often theoretical and disciplinary reductionisms while dealing with cities in the Middle East. Accordingly, this book is multi-disciplinary in its scope and guides the reader towards a comprehensive understanding of the main research strands in the field. The book aims to present critical and theoretical understanding of urbanism in the region, highlighting the great relevance of Middle East cities to the growing field of urban studies and Middle East studies and politics.

The book focuses both on the symbolic and tangible construction of place in cities. Through presenting different case studies from the Middle East, we wish to open up an interdisciplinary debate that includes the fields of architecture, geography, history, planning, anthropology, sociology, political science, urban studies and Middle East studies –– all areas that are represented by the backgrounds of the scholars who have contributed to this volume. The richness of the case studies and the theoretical debates reveal various insights concerning historical as well as current urban conditions in the Middle East, and the selected chapters analyse and theoretically discuss different cases, including San’a, Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran and Hebron to mention but few, in which cities are linked to global and local processes, how cities are planned and used, the effects that conflicts and violence have on cities, and the nature of the role of communities and their memory, in shaping urban life in the Middle East nowadays. 

As the chapters reveal, an interdisciplinary engagement is greatly needed since, as AlSayyad and Castells have suggested, neither body of knowledge is complete or credible without the other. To put it differently, no discussion of the emergence of an “urban Middle East” and the management of social relations in the political climate that the Middle East experiences nowadays, can ignore the pivotal role of cities in both generating and challenging the national order, control and resistance. Likewise, no serious historical account of urbanization in the Middle East, or discussion of contemporary globalizing cities, can overlook the central role of the Middle East in the shaping of “planetary urbanism” today. 

As the influential work of Abu-Lughod suggests, the literature on the so-called Islamic city offers an unconcealed paradigm of how a general theory on the city in the Middle East was transformed and developed through the study of few cases, mainly in North Africa, and the uncritical orientalist assumption of the role of “Islam” as an explanatory factor for urban development and form. Indeed, researchers who focused on urban history in the Middle East highlighted the colonial gaze over local populations. 

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, eds., Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity (New Texts Out Now)

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour (eds.), Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya: What made you edit this book? 

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour (KK & MG): We wanted to write a book that would contribute to the critical studies of modernity and global culture by making visible the actually existing, diverse, but previously neglected practices of social housing in the broader Middle East. We believed that the absence of a scholarly book that particularly addressed the topic was evident. Comparative studies existed, but either their geographical diversity was limited, or they included housing as part of larger debates in architecture, urban design, and city planning. So, we considered Social Housing in the Middle East as an opportunity to address this gap in scholarship. Following our co-chaired panel at the 69th annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2016, we came up with a book project that would bring together works on lesser known examples of social housing projects in the region by adopting cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives.

...lower-class families have extended the borders of the modernist paradigm...

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

KK & MG: The book underlines the interconnectedness of social housing experiences in the Middle East to various other sites, economies, and urban regimes around the world by gathering the stories behind projects that have until now remained virtually unexplored. In addition to further drawing attention to the agency of local builders and homeowners in refashioning interior and exterior spaces, it intervenes in the field by extending the notion of modernity beyond canonical buildings and by moving out of isolationist frameworks for the region. The book includes both practitioners and consumers within projects that have typically been addressed solely in terms of formal analysis. In addressing these interlinked agendas, accounts gathered in this volume seek to contribute to recent, more inclusive architectural history writing practices. In this respect, Social Housing in the Middle East is situated within the broad spectrum of critical postcolonial studies of architecture and urbanism.

The modernization of the Middle East and North Africa has been considered primarily as the story of elite groups. In the case of cities, the narrative usually consists of "important" works of architecture, either directly built by foreign (star) architects commissioned by "western oriented" governments or "western-educated" local actors. In response, chapters in this book tell diverse histories of alternative modes of dwelling cultures where lower-class families have extended the borders of the modernist paradigm by adopting, localizing, and reshaping given models. In doing so, the book turns its attention to marginalized subjectivities, competing identity claims, and class aspirations that have played a role in the development and transformation of lower-income housing settlements in the region.

Furthermore, housing is closely linked to topics that are both contemporary and whose scope reaches beyond mainstream architectural history writing—social movements, for instance. In response, our introduction chapter calls for the extension of social housing literature to include humanitarian endeavors such as building refugee camps and designing emergency dwellings (not typically included within the breadth of social and public housing), as well as activism organized around the “right to housing” in the MENA region.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

KK: My previous work focused on the transformation of the residential culture and the lower-income households in early twentieth-century Turkey. I also wrote on issues of urban culture and identity in contemporary Turkish cities. My collaboration with Mohammad began when he invited me to join the editorial team of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture in late 2011. Seeing that we worked together quite well and learned a lot from each other, we began to collaborate on research as well. 

MG: My previous research initially focused on Persian architecture and garden history, but I have published books on a wide range of topics, including bazaars in Islamic cities, synagogues in the Islamic world, and calligraphy in Islamic architecture. Although we had developed varied scholarly interests, both Kıvanç and I have backgrounds in architecture and architectural history, and have been interested in the contemporary urban developments in the Middle East, from large-scale landscape projects to temporary settlements, which brought us together in this project.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

KK & MG: We imagined Social Housing in the Middle East to be a work of reference for an international community of scholars and graduate students who are interested in exploring the role of locality in the production, transformation, and appropriation of global architectural typologies. The book includes both historical studies and contemporary debates on social housing in the region. For that reason, we hope that practitioners and policymakers, as well as housing activists, will also be interested in reading it. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

KK & MG: In addition to our individual research projects, we recently co-chaired a panel on “Housing Refugees in Urban Centers” at the 14th congress of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2019). We are also working on a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA), together with the guest editor Bülent Batuman, that will discuss the notion of displacement and its impact on architecture and the cities in the Islamic world.

J: Do you think your book covered all major social housing projects in the region?

KK & MG: From the beginning, the edited collection did not intend to bring together all aspects of social housing production in the Middle East or all known examples in its near history, covering every single country. Our selection of each contribution is closely related to the structure of the book: the chapters are strong representatives of relevant themes surrounding the issue of social housing and spatial agency in the region. And although we initially planned to have a more even coverage, this has proven very difficult to accomplish, like in most edited volumes. Unfortunately, we did not receive any submissions from scholars working on sites that are usually excluded from mainstream sources, such as Palestine, Yemen, and Afghanistan. 


Excerpt from the book

Resurgent Typologies: The Apartment Block and Informal Housing

As in many other places in the world, in Middle Eastern cities mass housing has been but one of the formulas drawn in response to the quest for finding the right form of “inhabiting on a large scale.” While “large scale” has not always been the most popular solution, it has often been deemed the most economically sound answer to the housing problem. In Turkey, for instance, Siedlung-inspired detached and semi-detached types dominated the urban scene until the end of the 1950s. In the first half of the twentieth century, the so-called “rental barracks” were likened to contemporary prisons, which were thought to have symbolized a transient and nomadic life. Yet, beginning in the 1960s, these were gradually replaced by midrise and high-rise housing units, the most repeated form of social housing in the region today. The ambiguous reception of the big concrete blocks in Turkey is by no means unique. Across the world, multistory-type social housing models mostly emerged because of financial constraints or the lack of available land. For instance, in Iraq, multistory “public housing estates” that were built by various government agencies were mostly popular in the 1960s and 1970s. These models differed from the “low-rise high-density urban blocks” that characterized the larger modernization and reconstruction programs laid out by the state in the 1950s and were seldom repeated. In post-revolutionary Cairo, midrise modernist blocks were the widely adopted type in the 1950s and 1960s. This trend continued in the 1970s but gradually ceased in the 1980s, when regulation and planning gave way to the growth of informal settlements. Vast satellite cities built outside Cairo, once seen as a viable solution to stop mass migration to the capital city, ended up uninhabited or partially inhabited voids. In many other countries in the region, “the tendency for most affordable housing projects to be located in peripheral and relatively remote locations . . . has resulted in problems of higher social and infra- structure costs.”

Nevertheless, in stark contrast to Egypt and Turkey, the history of rapid urbanization linked to oil economies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain meant that welfare housing translated into the single-family detached home, and the consideration of alternative types has been rare. Similarly, in Iran, post-Revolutionary measures for centralization, such as the transition of ownership of urban wastelands to the government and regulation of the market, encouraged horizontal urban growth rather than high-rise developments. The second development plan of  the Islamic Republic continued this policy by focusing on producing social housing under the campaign of “building small.” Contemporary developments, such as the ambitious but poorly received Mehr Project (2007), however, consisted predominantly of midrise apartment blocks. In places where comprehensive government policies in social housing are yet to exist, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), private entrepreneurs who build affordable houses tend to reproduce existing high-rise models of luxury housing on a smaller scale and farther away from the city centers. 

While most countries chose to directly produce housing units, few ofthese attempts proved sufficient to meet rising needs. With increased migration to urban centers for prospects of better lives and jobs, as well as unending wars and conflict in the region, oceans of shantytowns began to emerge at the periphery of cities and towns. The unanticipated scale of informal housing in Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, and Yemen forced governments to look for more site-specific solutions, such as the sites-and-services approach, in which prospective users would be given cheap land and subsidies to build their own housing with affordable payment options, much below the market value. Another strategy was applying aided self-help housing methods, especially when government (central and local administrations) means were limited. When such attempts too fell short of providing sufficient housing supplies, primarily two things transpired: first, self-built vernacular housing typologies, including informal settlements in countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey, became customary urban forms in expanding cities. Second, small-scale contractors emerged as significant actors regulating the market in urban centers in competition with registered architects. In the second half of the twentieth century, cities in and around the Middle East were increasingly marked by “housing infill and densification” and self-help urban “apartment building extensions.”

… 

Architecture in the Age of Turmoil: Extended Scope of Social Housing

Beyond (post)colonial legacies, which still inform the present in countless ways, two recent global and regional developments continue to shape contemporary social housing policies in the region: one is the larger neoliberal economic trends that hurl the Middle East into becoming a construction zone, with a reduced role for central authorities in housing production. Growing inequality and privatization of services foster the expansion of self-help settlements around the region at the same time as the emergence of a transnational capitalist class as investors reconfigure the scene. New cities are now being built from scratch in compressed timeframes with little or no concern for decent working conditions, such as Lusail City  in Qatar, the host of the 2022 World Cup In Dubai’s infamous labor camps, thousands of workers who are reported to be working long hours on giant construction sites are denied access not only to adequate housing, but also to freedom of movement, basic health care, and social security. In Beirut, where mapping affordable housing, or any form of housing for that matter, has long been equated with “mapping security,” the city’s old neighborhoods are in continual transformation with the fast pace of high-rise and gated residential development. In the meantime, neoliberal economic policies in the region have not remained unchallenged. For instance, unequal urban development threatening to eat up the remaining bits of green spaces in Istanbul, coupled with rising cultural and religious conservatism, led to mass protests and unrest in 2013 with the Gezi movement in Turkey.

The second major development affecting social housing debates is the political conflicts and violence, tension, and wars in the region, which caused millions of people to take refuge in countries neighboring Syria and Iraq, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Some of the early camps, built for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced from their villages and towns in the occupied territories as Israel tactically used (and continues to use) housing needs as a tool for colonial expansion, eventually became permanent residential areas. While Palestinians have long been denied the right to return their homes and lands, in the words of a humanitarian aid expert, these camp cities may well be the “cities of tomorrow.” One such example is the camp established by the International Committee of the Red Cross near Zarqa for Palestinian refugees after the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. According to the United Nations Work and Relief Agency (UNRWA) website, the agency “replaced the original tents with concrete shelters and over the years the refugees have made improvements and added more rooms. The camp now resembles other urban quarters in Zarqa.” Social geographer Myriam Ababsa writes that the unprecedented scale of such developments, in addition to financial difficulties, made Jordan steer away from its more comprehensive social housing and slum-upgrading programs in the 1990s and focus instead on providing basic services and infrastructure. The Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon has a similar story. In its old and newly built parts, one could see various permanent types of housing inhabited by diverse income groups. Almost completely destroyed during an armed conflict in 2007, the camp was rebuilt in 2011 by the UNRWA with the aim of reconstructing it “in a manner that preserves the social fabric through maintaining the camp’s pre-destruction neighborhood layout.” 

Beyond city centers, newly built refugee camps in the Middle East accommodate millions of people cramped in tiny shelters in a vast sea   of desert-barren land blemished by scarce water and thus unsuited for agriculture. Such crises drew the attention of not only humanitarian agencies, but also big manufacturers such as IKEA, to developing mic-dwellings, which go beyond either the container type or tent as a housing solution. An exhibition at MoMA in October 2016, Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, displayed “a range of objects, including the jointly-designed IKEA Foundation-UNHCR-Better Shelter modular emergency structure, along with works by Estudio Teddy Cruz, Henk Wildschut, and Tiffany Chung, among others.” Undoubtedly, the larger implications are becoming more devastating as homelessness and displacement in the region define a human tragedy of global dimensions. In the last six years, stories of these tragedies have been circulating in the news virtually every day: images of Syrian refugees sent back from European cities and borders to refugee camps, or the loss of life caused by desperate measures that families adopt to travel via land or sea to escape crises at home, to name a few. With these images and conditions in mind, is the time not ripe to rethink social housing as a category to include provincial refugee camps, as well as emergency dwellings, which, in practice, perform as permanent shelters?