Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration, a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University, and coeditor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence.

Abbreviations  xiii
Author’s Note  xv
Introduction. Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp  1
1. From Partitions  51
2. Land, Emergency, and Sedentarization in East Africa  99
3. Shelter and Domesticity  141
4. An Archive of Humanitarian Settlement  181
5. Design as Infrastructure  249
Afterword. “Poetry Is a Weapon That We Use in Both War and Peace”  305
Acknowledgments  321
Notes  329
Primary Sources  363
References  371
Index  397