Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2024).

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

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (AIS): Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement is a feminist abolitionist book. It speaks of carceral holds, the sedentarization of people, and the bordering of lives, which would otherwise be—and for generations have been—migratory and open. To understand this, my book demands that we look slowly and closely at architectural forms and spaces, particularly in settings of crisis—and particularly in African and Muslim contexts. We are inured to certain kinds of images that purport to represent places and, through them, people’s lives. We unwittingly assimilate violence as we visually consume certain kinds of images of built environments, for example, refugee environments. Through quietly examining the architectural forms, spatial practices, and historical geographies of one refugee camp, I ask us to reconsider the militarized modes by which we receive and construct knowledge. A refugee camp is indeed a spatial response to armed conflict. However, we often find ourselves understanding the camp as a teleological end in itself, glossing over the forces that normalize armed conflict. These forces either cast the camp as the abject remnant of war, which people have somehow brought upon themselves, or dismiss it as a temporary, precarious environment, lacking historical and aesthetic significance at all. My book, instead, asks us to take seriously the work of many people who construct environments, and to understand their activities as a form of signature work. I follow many people who have lived their lives, built their homes, farmed, provisioned, and created domestic security, comfort, and joy in the Dadaab refugee camps, one of the world’s most significant built environments, which has yet to be brought into the narrative and folded into architectural histories and histories of urban form. My book asks us to defamiliarize spaces that we may think we know because we have consumed them generically through a variety of visual means. I ask that we see these architectures and ecologies anew as living archives of the most extreme inhabitations of our shared world—repositories of the past and treasures for the future.

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

AIS: Architecture of Migration takes into hand art histories, historical materialities, and spatial politics, using text and images together in the spirit of Edward Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives and John Berger’s A Seventh Man (each working with photographs by Jean Mohr). My book begins by asking what we learn, how we theorize, when we look closely at a refugee camp. My response is that a refugee camp is the architectural afterlife of partitions: a partitioning of land (reproduced in architecture) and of the self (as refugees endure the process of being recognized). To understand partitions of land, I turn to The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, who interprets South Asia’s partitioning as a long and self-reproducing outcome of actions by governments, planners, agencies, and communities, rather than a line drawn on a map in an instant. To understand partitions of the self, I turn to Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, by Miriam I. Ticktin, who follows the imprints of the state on the bodies of asylum seekers as it imposes humanitarian care. The racialization of bodies and architecture broadly has been elucidated in the scholarship of Mabel O. Wilson, co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, and Esra Akcan, whose empirical methods and historiographical re-readings animate Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA 1984/87, on the inhabitation of modernist architecture by Turkish refugees. My book traces racialized partitionings in the construction of emergency territory, which enabled processes of sedentarization at the core of a practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that I name “humanitarian settlement.” It closely examines the construction of shelter and domesticity by women as a critical heritage practice. It also assembles disparate archives to offer a history of Dadaab’s planning and design histories of the many mobile architectures that constitute its built landscape.  

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

AIS: I often examine intellectual histories, esthetic practices, and forms of cultural production in my work, thinking through diverse objects, buildings, and landscapes in time and through their historiographies. My scholarship centers African and South Asian questions in histories of architecture, modernity, and migration. I often focus on historicity and archives, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices, and aim to foreground histories of marginalized people and promote practices of collaboration and support. I am especially concerned with the lives and narratives of communities that have been systematically excluded or silenced. Research for Architecture of Migration followed these scholarly orientations, drawing from many years of archival, ethnographic, and visual study in East Africa, South Asia, and Europe to analyze the history, visual rhetoric, and spatial politics of Dadaab as an epistemological vantage point in African and Muslim worlds. My book moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants, finding long migratory and colonial traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, material culture, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. It informs my wider body of research on histories of architecture, craft, settlement, and land, experiences of migration and territorial partition, and constructions of the past through architectural practice, pedagogy, and discourse on the African continent and South Asian subcontinent.

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

AIS: My book asks us to think and speak differently, to narrate our histories differently, to open up the ways we understand the complexity of the constructed and inhabited world. I wrote this book for undergraduates, graduate students, and my colleagues. It is a scholarly book, but it is written for anyone who wants to think about migration and architecture at a conceptual level, with historically specific sites and objects. It will be especially meaningful to readers whose sensibilities have formed in the global South. It is the first book that archives and historicizes a refugee camp, but more so a significant built environment that behaves as both camp and urban form, and which analyzes a history of spatial practices rooted in Africa, in Muslim world sensibilities, and in Indian Ocean traditions. My book crucially brings together archival, visual, ethnographic, and literary and discursive methods, and informs multiple fields through the methods of others. It is also an art historical meditation on and deconstruction of architectural history and the architectural image.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AIS: I am presently completing the book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva, which historically contextualizes the work of architect Minnette de Silva, one of the first women in the world to establish a professional architectural practice as sole principal (in Ceylon, in 1947), and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier, organizer of a documentary team that visited the Duanhang caves (where Buddhism is believed to have emerged in China) in the 1950s—a time when the country was closed to travelers from the West—and editor of the UNESCO series, “Man Through His Art.” The work and intellectual careers of these significant Sri Lankan cultural figures activated global art and architectural modernism through an attentiveness to land-based material practices in South Asia, including horticultural cultivation and production of textiles and a variety of other crafts. Through design interventions and writings on ecologies of the past, they critically constructed an understanding of heritage environments. Their feminisms, environmentalisms, artistic and archival practices, and attention to craft and construction labor provide a singular reflection on twentieth-century histories and landscapes—against backdrops of empire, radical economic change, and militarization and armed conflict.

J: What new directions has Architecture of Migration opened up?

AIS: As part of the process of completing the book, I invited artists to engage in its central questions, imagining that if the core arguments in the book hold true, then intellectuals with their own developed practices might engage these arguments and take them further. I am delighted to be working with these artists and others who have since joined our collaboration on an exhibition titled Dadaab Commons, opening in March 2025 at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, alongside the launch of the book in Africa. Dadaab Commons includes works by Abdulfatah Adam, Cave Bureau, Deqa Abshir, Elsa MH Mäki, James Muriuki, Peterson Kamwathi, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. It is enormously gratifying to see questions at the heart of the book— on land and architecture, belonging and cohabitation—come to life through our discussions and in the work of these gifted thinkers and makers. None of us comes from Dadaab. This exhibition is a gesture, intended as a sort of message in a bottle to our sisters and brothers in Dadaab and in refugee camps the world over: an aesthetic practice of political speech, taken up as a form of solidarity.

Many in Dadaab have educated themselves, and will write their own histories one day if they wish. My book is not the first to concern itself with Dadaab and cannot possibly be the last; I see it as a bridge. Since its publication, the Dadaab refugee camps have undergone certain legal changes that will allow people who live there to become integrated into the Kenyan social and political landscape. While such changes are complex, and hardly as straightforward as they may seem, this sea change augurs a kind of abolition, and gives me a sense of hope.

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, “Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp,” pp. 1-3 and 44-45)

A refugee camp is not an object. It is one prolonged event in a history, marked through architecture. The migration occasioning this architecture results from disruption in state and civil order. This architecture extends emergency and gives it form through the materialization and visual rhetoric of precarity. As the architecture of emergency intervention reconfigures the state, international structures, and civil society, the ephemerality of the camp creates figurations of abjection, homelessness, and ahistoricity. This sleight of hand is performed in relation to predetermined frameworks for understanding forced migration only in its immediacy, and not as a factor within longer negotiated processes that slowly erode society and political and cultural imagination. These frameworks cast architecture only as an expression of fixity, establishment, and institution. They have yet to imagine an architecture of migration.

Preconceptions of violent migration and unsettlement circumscribe not only refugees’ lives, but notions of home and history. These conditions consign the richer notions of domesticity to the provisionality of emergency shelter. They constrict histories to a limited scope of legitimacy, including only those framed by archives representing landed wealth and settlement. These circumscriptions would suggest that neither architecture nor history may be found in a refugee camp.

That this discourse falls into a racializing chassis may be too obvious to bear mention, as the question of whether or not something is architectural or historical has been inextricably bound up with questions of whether its proponents are fully human. Yet, centering such violence minimizes the more radical misdirection performed by this circumscription of architectures and histories. Such a limitation masks underlying migrations that form generative ways of life. These migratory worlds constitute alternate approaches to settlement, which resist colonization, fortification, and sedentarization. They propose architectural connections to the land other than those related to the political economy of resource extraction. Looking closely at the spatial and temporal paradoxes of a refugee camp brings into view how migration acts as a basis for people’s lives, illuminating how historicity works, so that those lives are extended within landscapes of meaning and critical heritage.

What do we learn when we see a refugee camp? What lives and futures does its architecture trace? How does the space of emergency shape the experience of time? Can we imagine history and heritage in a humanitarian crisis? How does an architecture of migration build knowledge and consciousness for all? These are the questions that animate this book, as it brings into focus one set of refugee settlements as a basis for diverse explorations and concept histories. In 1991, near the village of Dadaab, Kenya, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (unhcr) initiated an emergency intervention that continues to the date of this writing, a relief operation spawning a temporary encampment into which three generations of people have been born. Dadaab is a Kenyan town whose English translation I have not found. The name also signifies a humanitarian complex of offices and staff residences opposite this town, across a highway, as well as camps to the north and south: Ifo; Dagahaley; Hagadera; Ifo 2; and, at one time, Kambioos. The Dadaab refugee complex began appearing on common maps with the advent of Google Earth in 2001, but for years it was the largest hosting operation ever undertaken by the unhcr. Its scale resulted from a policy instituted by the Kenyan government, which segregated and restricted the mobility of refugees. This form of apartheid impacted the education, labor, and migration of people. Dadaab has been called an “open-air prison,” and in many ways it has been carceral. Yet, it has cradled diverse experiences. In Dadaab, Isnina Ali Rage won an election. Alishine Osman spearheaded the first cohort of refugee students passing through primary and secondary school. Maganai Saddiq Hassan designed and cultivated a farm. Shamso Abdullahi Farah built a home and a body of expertise. Sudanese and Somali women established a restaurant and founded construction workers’ collectives. The experiences of these refugees underlie the making of this significant environment. This book sees them as architects and their work as an architecture of migration.

This book understands migration as its own form of knowledge. Through a refugee camp, I examine an architecture that has constricted movement and sedentarized people, yet nevertheless exposes longer migratory lifeways and traditions. While the category of refugee is a specific legal one, with political and social horizons different from those of the migrant, thinking with the Dadaab refugee camps allows us to place the refugee within the wider landscape of migration, regional and global, present and past. People across statuses converge in Dadaab; all have migrated, and all have settled. I offer a concept history that uses the condition of migration as a method to study settlement.

…

Taking the Dadaab settlement as an analytic, the book’s arguments unfold along a narrative path that reverses the typical structure of an ethnography or material study, either of which moves in the direction of observation and description to analysis and theorization. Instead, the chapters are arranged to present theoretical arguments at the outset, in chapters 1–3, in order to empower the reader to arrive with an expanded knowledge to the immediate history and ecology of the settlement in chapter 4, and then to a global humanitarian material culture in chapter 5. Encountering a humanitarian environment without first implanting the conceptual premise of drawing theory from forms runs the risk of presenting a teleology, of naturalizing the foreign humanitarian camp rather than estranging it. Refugee camps are frequently rendered as objects of emergency, whose manufactured ahistoricity and abjection imply that people brought the camp, as an endpoint, upon themselves. Instead, Dadaab reveals long historical processes that could have come to other ends. It demonstrates material and epistemic richness in the present. The chapters of this book build, each on the last, to counter a teleology of a refugee camp and to show that it is not its own logical end. Rather than a tragedy of the refugee camp in general, and Dadaab in particular, this material and social trajectory is a profound site of theory. It is an architecture of migration.

The opening chapters reveal Dadaab slowly through three frames that build on one another, beginning with the vital conceptualization that undergirds the book: that when we see a refugee camp, what we encounter—what lies underneath—is a partition. That an architecture of migration comes from partitions is the first argument made in the book, in chapter 1, and is intended to immediately dispel conventional views of refugee camps by arguing that specific historical and rhetorical forces construct them as oppressed spaces. The first chapter argues that a camp is not an intact event but stems from partitions of land and self. Chapter 2 is intended to push the reader beyond the frame of emergency to see history in Dadaab, positing that the Dadaab camps emerged out of long and contradictory historical forces of sedentarization and not only a recent emergency. Chapter 3 leads the reader beyond the frame of shelter to intimacies and domesticities, illuminating Dadaab’s located domesticities as part of broader, universal histories and global spatial practices of shelter. Having followed this path of eliminating preconceptions, the reader will be critically strengthened to arrive to the humanitarian camp in chapter 4 and humanitarian designs in chapter 5.

The chapters are organized along regimes of historicity: from the first, whose considerations inhabit a period of nearly three hundred years, to the fifth, which occupies a much shorter period during the first decades of the twenty-first century. They are also organized according to spatial registers, expanding or contracting with each chapter, from the single site to the spheres across which its subjects and objects migrate. Each chapter opens with a vignette that brings into focus one aspect of the constructed environment in Dadaab. The vignette speaks to the empirical conditions that distinguish the Dadaab refugee camps, setting the stage for a global history and an intellectual history explored in each chapter. This structure is a strategy to demonstrate how Dadaab “in situ” can open onto Dadaab “in theory.”

Open access link here.