Siddiqi, Anooradha Iyer. 2024. Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement. Durham & London: Duke University Press. pp. 412.

Recent literature on displacement compares refugee camps to cities to address the relationship between the camp and urban refugees. Meanwhile, scholars such as Bram Jansen (2018) argue that the camp has become a city forged by refugees using humanitarian aid. However, a refugee camp is more than its physical entity. Siddiqi argues that it is an event with an indefinite time and history shaped by the architectonic materialization of precarity and instability. Her book delves into the Dadaab camps, a refugee complex established in 1991 when refugees fleeing the civil war in Somalia entered Kenya. It considers it a sensible place with its own history, origins and forms of knowledge. Based on a historical narrative as a critical act of learning with its subjects (p. 43), the author reports on the imaginations of Dadaab's inhabitants and their move from simply subsisting to living. In her constant search for a new language to interpret the Dadaab refugee camps, Siddiqi goes backwards to delve into and retrace the time spaces of African modernity. Delving into the historicity of territorialization allows the author to span from 300 years to the first decades of the twenty-first century, creating a spatiotemporal framework to contextualize the humanitarian settlement as an architecture with a history. The book is structured into three interlinked parts. Chapter 1 describes the creation of a refugee camp through the concept of partitions. Indeed, Dadaab's history underlies the essence of the camp as a partition of land as a colonial practice, and a partition of people as a humanitarian practice to stratify people's lives. A refugee camp segregates humanity based on the type of need and care people have the right to receive. Moreover, it acts at the metaphysical level in partitioning personhood since people experience a division of the self in the “negotiation of new forms of subjecthood in emergency” (p. 52). On the contrary, the partition of the land is a political act that reflects the bordering architecture process, with borderscapes segregating bodies and enacting partitions. Partition thinking is a construction that does not represent reality. It is a fallacy and fiction that is brought into full narrative fruition through histories and authorized archives that undergird their dissemination (p. 95). Chapter 2 investigates colonial forms of settlement to respond to emergencies through sedentarization over migration. As Siddiqi poses, it examines a moral economy of migration (p. 100). The chapter revolves around the concept of borders as a practice of enclosing a territory, interlinking the emergency construction of the territorial humanitarian help with the sedentarization and control of people. People who, by history, were nomads or constantly moving from place to place were sedentarized in a contradictory process of inhabiting and cultivating the land as modes of living and thriving in Dadaab (p. 99). These forms of settlement construction stem from colonial practices of land use and tenure in East Africa to support sedentarization eroding the history of past practices and modes of living relating to the land. Therefore, humanitarian settlement transformed common land into a partitioned borderscape as a form of land violation and privatization. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part investigates the colonial construction of the territory where the Dadaab camp is located. The second part discusses the forms of coercive enclosure as precursors of the camp. The third part focuses on the building types. The focus is on land, its transgression and spatial violence, operated through dispossession and infrastructures that legitimate redistribution and enclosure. In constructing a refugee camp, land with its socio-ecological components, materiality, economy and politics are extruded from the architecture of the built structure, appearing imposed and separated from the life and the equilibrium of the territory it stands. But despite all of these, refugees recreate a connection with the land by cultivating it, transforming the space into a place that offers subsistence to the family and ecological stability. The vignette of a refugee shaping a kitchen garden in her plot is used by the author to critically report on the history of land contestation in the Jubaland while investigating the materialization of the Dadaab camps in a marginal area, its history in the nineteenth twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a place for liberation or coercion and the specific use of the building types of makuti and tuqul to represent sedentarization and resistance to it. The architecture of the Dadaab camps made centuries of fraught settlement under emergency conditions visible (p. 107). The uses of these two building typologies fixed in a place provide a compelling visual rhetoric of a heritage form, a feminist construction and a recalcitrant architecture of migration (p. 138). Chapter 3 examines the shelter types and their relation to domesticity. Strictly linked to the previous chapter and the notion of partition, it deconstructs the notion of shelter and its materiality to redefine domesticity as constructed and lived in a refugee camp. The chapter inquires on the concept of home and recreating home in displacement. In so doing, it introduces the theory of insurgent domesticities as radical practices of mothers in the Dadaab camps to perform homemaking to domesticate the everyday needs of living in an emergency. Domesticity is interpreted as “the camp's theory, its immanent form of knowledge” (p. 315) and people's critical constructions of migratory ways of life in an emergency. The focus on this concept stems from the imperative to narrate inhabitation, privacy and interiority as a necessity rather than luxuries. Domesticity as such, even if gendered, sexualized, raced and ethnicized, is an affective, poetic, existential form of expertise (p. 146). Building on the theory of ecofeminist architectural histories of migration, the chapter aspires to radical, non-hierarchical equality and a political commitment to alterity. Chapter 4 revolves around the architecture and planning of Dadaab using the three foundational concepts of the previous chapters: partition, sedentarization and domesticity. It counternarrates the camp's historiographical representation throughout its history. To do so, the author critically engages in a reading of the UNHCR camp's archival materials in Geneva headquarters, which depict the camp as an emergency spatial response to perpetual war, to create a new archive that counters the ephemerality of this settlement and its architecture (p. 315). Chapter 5 centres on the historical and architectural construction of the Dadaab camps to critically investigate the design and construction practices of a refugee camp and uncover the understudied histories of humanitarian institutions. It is a fact that most of these institutions improperly act as designers in an emergency context. Thus, it conveys that design is not fundamental when communities strive for survival and basic needs, as Dainese and Staničić (2022) argue. The chapter demonstrates how the utilitarian standardization and current practice of camp construction have commodified the aid. Moreover, it states the importance of the Dadaab camps as a testing ground for developing humanitarian shelter and settlement spatial practices. This became a reference for recent camp developments, such as the al-Za'atari camp in Jordan in 2012. Drawing on the theory of people as infrastructure formulated by AbdouMaliq Simone (2021), who defines infrastructure as the “combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices.” Siddiqi reflects on the embodied practices of women's labour and mutual aid in a refugee camp. Those practices embody the collaborative space to understand the architecture of migration as made by refugees in their planning artefacts, sharing knowledge and building community. The book approaches the theme of refugee camps from a perspective that considers architecture in its broad sense and socially and politically engaged ways. In doing so, it has several novelties, including a gender focus and the insurgent domesticity concept, a historical narrative and critical closeness (p. 138). It describes women's role in the camp's architecture and critically presents the gender spatial politics of the humanitarian regime. The notion of shelter in migratory contexts demands a paradigm shift towards new feminist and architectural languages of an ecology of domesticity. The book argues for a reading of the refugee camp that interlinks different pasts and futures to resist a politics of occlusion. Furthermore, it focuses on design, specifically in emergency, as inclusive of all the signatures of the camp's architecture. A design that, in the context of conflicts, creates commodification of the humanitarian design/architecture and aesthetic responses to perpetual wars. A design that has the power of a weapon to be used in times of crisis and peace. Moreover, the book is written to counter the violence of history's disappearance and prioritize collaborative knowledge formation over colonial valuation practices and cultural imperialism (p. 41). It is a “call for peace” between the humanitarian response and the humanitarianism of colonial practices of perpetuated control, spatial violence, incarceration and subjugation to aid processes and the everyday construction in a specific land of inhabitant's events in a time process. It accounts for reflecting on the concept of architecture as an instrument of power, which in war contexts denied people freedom of migration. It is a counternarrative on the refugee camp as an architecture to manage people on the move, removed from its conceptual meaning. Considering all the above, this book is recommended for those interested in or studying migration from the spatial point of view. The opinions expressed in this Book Review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons. NA.