Permanent temporariness
The urbanisation process of the Jabal al-Hussein refugee camp
K. Klein Gunnewiek (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
G. Schwake – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / A)
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Abstract
Refugee camps are considered temporal places, outside of the normal juridical order, in which people are waiting to restart their lives in a new place or return to their original homes. The Palestinian refugee camps, which have existed for almost 70 years now, challenges these conceptions. The development of the Jabal al-Hussein camp, one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman, Jordan, from tent camp to neighbourhood, its governmentality by both the Jordan government and URNWA, and the new social structures combined show in this case study that the camp is a very paradoxical and ambiguous spatial form in terms of temporality, exclusion and stagnation. Or in other words, in its permanence, inclusion and identity. Therefore, we must reconsider the theories on refugee camps and shift our focus from the symbolic-political to the material-lived.