Architecture of Migration: An Interview with Anooradha Siddiqi
Anooradha Siddiqi is Assistant Professor of Architecture, Barnard College, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2024). Sabrina Salam (BC ’24) is a Research Assistant at BCRW.
Sabrina Salam: What critical problem do you look at in this book?
Anooradha Siddiqi: I look at architecture and migration together. I wanted to look at an architecture that is often misunderstood, if it is seen as architecture at all. Most historians leave refugee camps outside of the historical narrative. They generally do not understand camps as architectures that make a discursive intervention. To challenge this, I studied the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya through their architecture and history, their aesthetics, and their politics.
SS: Can you talk about your use of the term or framework of architecture?
AS: I use the word architecture precisely because it is important that we see camps not as provisional environments that result from emergency but as imagined, designed, and constructed environments with agentive capacity that endure over time. They carry archival knowledge. They hold people’s memories. In Dadaab, and other places where I worked, the built environment conveys economic, political, and social meanings. . From one angle, the forms appear as rapid responses to crises but from another angle we can see them as products of long political, economic, and ideological processes that have unfolded over generations. They draw from dense material and social ecosystems in which people have made their lives.
But there is also an urgency to the camps, a present-ness in people’s experience that sort of belies the attempt to experience a longer historical time. When people end up in camps, of course they are not thinking about the long arc that got them there or built the environment around them. So in this book project it was important to me to slow down the process of seeing emergency by focusing on the built environment. The built environment is neither made in an instant, nor can it be apprehended in an instant. It is structural, which means that many processes come together to form it over time. Through the structures of the built environment, we can see larger spatial practices, including responses to climate change or political crises. Working from that planetary scale allowed me to slow down from the urgent pace of emergency to think about history and time marked in an urgently built form.
So I open the book with a question about this architectural form. What do we learn when we look closely at a refugee camp? I came to learn that a camp is the afterlife of a partition. The refugee camps I studied also show evidence of a long process of sedentarization: people settling in places where they might not have been located otherwise, where they might not have lived in a conventionally “settled” way. I met people who, had they followed other trajectories, might have been pastoralists. Their voluntary life might have been migratory, but they lived as migrants with all the penalties that condition assumes because a border regime was imposed on them. And so, in the long life of a refugee camp, there is a conflation of the migrant and the pastoralist. The architecture of the camp is part of what materializes the political reality of the border and the political identity of the migrant.
SS: From what you are describing, the term “architecture of migration” seems like a paradox. Do you think that is true?
AS: Yes, for me it is a paradox. We think of architecture as something fixed and the refugee camp as a transitory space. We also think of architectural history as a field that comes exclusively from fixed archives, that is, landed archives, or archives that are predicated on landed wealth. In this project I wanted to think with migrants about an architectural history whose primary sources come from them. Usually when people speak of history in relation to a refugee camp, they are referring to tracing where people came from, what place they fled from, where they go if they are resettled. “History” is outside the camp. But an architecture of the camp has its own life and history. Looking closely at the Dadaab refugee camps, and following how structures are designed or made, what architectural precedents they refer to, what methods they iterate or leave out, we see long regional histories and long global histories. In this way, we can start to understand much bigger histories than the events of displacement or arrival alone, which are the conditions a refugee camp is not only associated with but limited to.
SS: What was your process of figuring out how to visualize this space for your readers to see what you saw? How do you visualize movement?
AS: During my research, I was working with the Women’s Refugee Commission and traveling to many refugee camp sites. I started to realize there were certain architectural forms I was seeing over and over again. And I also realized that the things that mattered most were the things I was not seeing. Those of us looking from the outside have a privileged viewpoint, and we tend to prioritize what is visible to us. There is much that we do not see and much that we do see that we might approach with more skepticism. I gained a great deal of knowledge in Dadaab, but not from the sense of sight.
Let me say this: I got very interested in the representation of Dadaab, because representation is established by institutions, agencies, governments. Dadaab has been surveilled, photographed, drawn, and mapped over and over during the last thirty years. I wanted to know how Dadaab would look if it was drawn by someone not involved in controlling people’s migration or managing populations. That was how I came to work with the artists whose work appears in the book’s afterword. It was a great privilege to explore the question of drawing Dadaab with them. Over the course of our collaboration, and in my research prior to this collaboration with artists, I started taking a lot of photographs myself. I did this carefully and only took photographs when it was appropriate to do so. Over time, I felt that publishing the photos would be an important part of this project. But I am very selective.
SS: Among the images you show us are the inflatable hospitals. You talk about how Médecins Sans Frontières had urban stagings of their work, such as the “Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City.” Can you talk about that?
AS: Yes. Médecins Sans Frontières has had a series of public education initiatives to bring awareness to their work and engage urban residents, including people who might participate in their work as donors. “Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City” was one of those demonstrations. Its title was simply a straightforward explanation of their intervention to reconstruct a camp in three dimensions in public spaces where people could enter and interact with it as part of a storytelling process. MSF took this outdoor exhibition to several cities around the world. I do not know how MSF’s leaders or the exhibition organizers would frame or reflect on the project today. The MSF presence is so robust in Dadaab that I felt it was important to understand how the field office related to global operations. I studied the initiatives of MSF and MSF Logistique among the many design histories that I was trying to tell. For example, the inflatable hospital was part of a significant practice of architectural design for this NGO.
SS: So “Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City” was more about the international organization framing it for an outside audience.
AS: It has been interesting for me to learn about the way that these international organizations have had to operate. Especially after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the 1990s when a lot of organizations had to compete for donor funds, spectacular architectures could attract funding, as opposed to something that was not photogenic, such as services that might be very urgent but are provided within a temporary infrastructure that leaves a less tangible trace. You do not see them in the same way. That is the context for MSF’s urban stagings.
SS: I think there is a lot of that in the book, looking at authority. Can we shift and talk about partitions? I am wondering how it is that demarcations define the conditions of people migrating. You describe partitions as a fallacy. What do you mean?
AS: It takes time for this framework to sink in because it is not the way we were taught to look at things. Much like I believe we think we know what a refugee camp is, it is another thing to look very closely and see that things are not as we thought. It is similar with borders. We take a lot for granted about borders, even those of us who are engaged in a robust borders discourse. The primary thing we take for granted is that the border exists. It does not. What I mean is that a border is continuously negotiated at all times. A border does not exist except in all the rituals and laws that we impose on land. So, by way of unlearning this, before we even talk about borders, let us talk about partitions.
This has been very important to note in African studies. We tend to talk about the border as though it is a de facto condition. There has been such a scramble—to use a term—to deal with the European borders that were imposed that we are too busy dealing with the aftereffects. These are the issues that drove me to want to slow this process down. Understanding a border as being predicated on a partition is very different from understanding a border as an event that has already occurred.
Understanding a border as predicated on a partition allows you to think about a historical moment when things could have gone a different way. And it allows you to see the land as fundamentally unpartitioned. That is what I mean when I say partitions are a fallacy. We think they are real because we are thinking through borders. It is very difficult not to do. We live in countries that have citizenship and borders. But those realities can change at any moment. They change all the time. And borders are so porous. Part of this robust border discourse is an architectural one that draws attention to the fact that states build walls because the borders are so porous and unreal. Borders have to be made real through architecture. Looking at a refugee camp through this lens is a way to unthink the border. We can think about things that happened to make the refugee camp. A refugee camp in a way has a direct line to a partition. It does not come after the border, it precedes it.
SS: Okay, so for refugee camps, we have to unthink the border that seems to define them. That is something I had not even considered.
AS: Well, it is paradoxical to think of a refugee camp as something that is actually reinforcing the border. It is the response to someone crossing a border. The only reason the camp is there is because someone has crossed a border, in the case of a UNHCR camp.
Some of what I have been trying to understand is this: The camp is the afterlife not of the border but of the partition. What I am trying to advocate for in the book is a move away from partition thinking. If we start to do that, we do start to understand that a border is only a border negotiated as such.
Also, there are territorial partitions and there is the partitioning of the self that I think every refugee experiences: the you as you are, and the you that you have to perform to be recognized as a refugee.
SS: So, if I can shift gears for a moment, I want to talk about the women you interviewed, who were very present in the book. For example, you spoke with Shamso Abdullahi Farah, who portrayed how a business owner in a refugee camp could, in that role, build community. I am wondering more broadly how these women who you interviewed thread together the fabric of the community?
AS: I really appreciate that question. My work was made possible through the collaboration of many women and mothers, whose insights appear throughout the book. To study a site such as a refugee camp, particularly the UNHCR-administered settlements at Dadaab, is to enter a women’s world.
I did not go into the project saying this is a women’s studies project, but there is no way to study contemporary refugee spaces or the history of refugee spaces without thinking through a gendered lens.
Shamso Abdullahi Farah was one of many people I met. I included dialogues with people I talked to frequently who did not mind shouldering the narrative of the story, and Farah was basically a public figure in the camps because of the work that she did.
There is an unspoken and well-known aspect of UNHCR refugee camps—and possibly this is true of all camps—that they are mostly populated by women and children. If you are able-bodied, if you are a man, if you have any other options, you do not station yourself in a camp. You go to a camp if you have challenges—mobility issues, pregnancy, if your circumstances make it so that you need assistance with things like shelter or protection. Although, arguably, refugee camps are more dangerous than being in an urban environment. But the important thing is that refugee camps are spaces with agglomerations of people in dense living arrangements. They are significant built environments largely made of and by women.
And these built environments are not thought of as architecture. They do not enter the narrative of architectural history. We do not think of them as having history. And we do not think of them as being symbolically important. What does that mean for places that are largely designed and built by women? We should think of them as women’s environments, worldwide. There are a few refugee camps that might be male dominated. For example, in specific regions where mostly men are fleeing conscription into armies, or something like that. But in parts of the world where the UNHCR is operating, camps are largely filled with women and minors.
SS: Wow, so that changes your thinking enormously when you realize that these are spaces that have importance, and they are also women’s spaces.
I wanted to circle back to this idea of architecture of migration. Architecture of migration is the design and infrastructure for a population presumed to be transient, or at least on the move. The last image in the book is not a photo or a map, but an artwork. The image resembles tents in a refugee camp. Why did you decide to include this image at the end?
AS: The book ends on a speculative note. The artworks are part of an attempt to test out the arguments in the scholarship. If what I lay out in the book is true, then we should be able to draw Dadaab differently.
The painting on the cover, which opens the afterword, is by Deqa Abshir. She has her own narrative behind the series that this painting comes from, but she was also thinking through this particular architecture, what it symbolizes for her community, for her family, and for herself.
Ultimately, Architecture of Migration is not a book that one writes to be the final expert on everything. For me, it was intended to be the beginning of a conversation that people can take up in their own ways, using their own practices. This is perhaps a decolonial methodology. If the argument is right, someone else will be able to take it and make something else with it. That is what I think these artists did.
SS: Is there anything else you would like to share about the project?
AS: From the beginning of the project it has been important to capture paradoxes. It is a paradox to see many of these pastoral dwellings, called tuquls, bunched together in one place. People cannot live like that. It negates the pastoral economy. Tuquls are meant to be surrounded by land for animals to graze, the space required for an entire flock. Mobile dwellings fixed in place in a refugee camp tell a story. It is a story about the sedentarization of people. Tuquls cannot be connected to civil infrastructure, to plumbing. They do not have square walls. They are not meant to be put together densely adjacent to one another. There were many paradoxes like that, which stand out visually. There were also many paradoxes that could not be captured or conveyed by the logics that we may be used to.
My hope was that by ending with the works of artists we could begin to make sense of these paradoxes. It frees us from the need to verbalize things or follow a logic that very neatly explains itself. That is at the core of the writing: bringing these paradoxes to light as they exist on the ground in a real place that we are made to not see, even when we are looking at it.