The Journal of Architecture

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Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan: a socio-

spatial analysis of chaotic camps

Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys & Anoma Kumarasuriyar

To cite this article: Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys & Anoma Kumarasuriyar (2022) Domestic
refugee architecture in Jordan: a socio-spatial analysis of chaotic camps, The Journal of
Architecture, 27:1, 44-70, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2022.2062034

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Published online: 23 May 2022.

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 44
Dima M. Hanna
School of Design
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
d.mourishanna@qut.edu.au
dimammaurice@gmail.com
ORCID 0000-0002-1382-5656
Laurie Buys
School of Design
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
l.buys@qut.edu.au
Anoma Kumarasuriyar
Faculty of Engineering, School of
Architecture & Built Environment
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
a.kumarasuriyar@qut.edu.au
Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar
Domestic refugee architecture in
Jordan: a socio-spatial analysis of
chaotic camps
This paper explores the evolution of re-appropriated refugee dwellings
in protracted scenarios in Jordan through the interrogation of humani-
tarian design solutions by mapping and analysing spatial enclosures of
shelters in three separate camps. By exploring the ways temporary emer-
gency shelters in camps built and managed by the humanitarian sector
developed into a chaotic and aggregated built environment, we
present a socio-spatial perspective on the architecture of containment.
Interrogating the relationship between the traditional spatial practices
of the region and the creation of what we call ‘domestic refugee archi-
tecture’, we unpack discussions on the occurrence of lived-in spaces that
cross over imposed humanitarian tangents and subvert the conception
of refuge as shelter for human bodies in the absence of culture and tra-
dition. We conclude that, while displacement may mean geographic and
physical dispossession from a homeland, it does not imply social and cul-
tural dispossession.
Introduction
When people flee the wars and conflicts of their homelands to seek refuge
within planned settlements, their displacement is defined by the loss of their
physical home and dispossession from their geography, buildings, and belong-
ings. Upon arrival at an UN-operated camp, the displaced communities are sub-
mitted to a registration process and subsequently assigned shelters. This relief
practice effectively strips the citizenship status of the displaced people by giving
them an official ‘refugee’ status, redefining their political identity.
The shelters are temporary familial-based units on demarcated areas of space
set up within the borders of a camp under the sovereignty of the humanitarian
body. Giorgio Agamben describes this process of emplacing refugees in camps
on the legal and political thresholds of state sovereignty as a ‘state of excep-
tion’.1 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (also known as
the UN Refugee Agency, hereafter UNHCR) considers shelter an essential
right for refugees and others of concern. Thus, shelters are defined by the
purpose they fulfil, being ‘protection from the elements, to [provide] a space
in which they can live and store belongings, and to [provide] privacy, comfort
and emotional security’.2 Carefully designed by the humanitarian body as a
space to contain displaced communities — suspended, as they are, in the
endless protraction of temporary relief and their new, supposedly depoliticised,
# 2022 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2022.2062034
 45 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Number 1

identity — formal refugee camps are intended to be places of necessity and

apolitical impartiality. As such, the humanitarian sector provides a standardised
design solution: single-space units established on host grounds without foun-
dation; gridded organisation; short lifespan materials such as corrugated metal
or asbestos sheets; and kitchens and bathrooms separated as communal ser-
vices. This humanitarian design solution — inspired essentially by military
encampments — imposes acultural orders of space and containment on
these displaced communities.3
Despite this formalised structure, literature on refugee camps in Jordan either
approaches the camp as an incomplete urban entity termed a ‘city-camp’,4 or
draws a picture of an irregular, aggregate, and dense built environment.5
Indeed, today this is actually the case. What started as a space constructed
by the humanitarian sector to contain a crisis has evolved over time to play
host to re-appropriated, imbricated, and complex architecture. The initial shel-
ters — now lived-in spaces suspended between the temporarily organised
nature of refugee camps and the permanent liminality of unresolved crises
— have developed into dwellings which we will term domestic refugee archi-
tecture. The juxtaposition between the austere delineations of the humanitar-
ian design solution and the naturally cultural evolutions of lived-in space has
resulted in chaotic, subversive, and improvised architectural occurrences that
challenge formal aesthetics, which would remain unexplained without a suffi-
cient interrogation.6
In 1948, following the ending of the British Mandate and the resulting UN
Partition Resolution of Palestine, Palestinians were displaced from their home-
lands following the Nakba, also known as the Catastrophe. Hundreds of thou-
sands of Palestinians walked, carrying their belongings, and crossed into Syria,
Lebanon, and Jordan in order to seek refuge in temporary camps on the out-
skirts of bordering cities, sites which initially accommodated around 750,000
Palestinians.7 In 1967, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War resulted in another wave
of 300,000 displaced Palestinians who again fled to neighbouring countries
such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.8 The two waves of displaced com-
munities never returned home, finding refuge in the formal refugee camps built
and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (hereafter
UNRWA) in addition to many informal encampments that remain unattended
up to now. Over the past three generations, significant adaptions have been
made to the built environment of the camp to service their growing needs as
the size of the displaced communities continued to increase, up to an estimated
two million in Jordan alone.9 Once again in 2011, the repercussions of the
Syrian Civil War, also known as the Syrian Crisis, caused another wave of dis-
placement in the Arab World. Around five million Syrians fled to Lebanon,
Jordan, and Turkey to camps hosted by the UNHCR, while another 6.3
million were internally displaced.10 Each of these waves of refugees produced
a specific culture of displacement — knowledge carried from their homelands
growing unique in an alien environment — producing domestic refugee archi-
tecture and the specific social logic entailed with living in the ordered space of
the camps.
46 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

In this article, we interrogate the current built environment in refugee camps

in Jordan from the inside out, using a socio-spatial theoretical lens. We argue
that the architecture of the camps, acting as a container for the lives of dis-
placed communities, is defined beyond the limits of its physical construction
and represents a significant vehicle for spatial elements of culture, embodying
vernacular building traditions and practices from the homelands of the refu-
gees. As such, we analyse shelters in three case studies, each representing
one of the refugee waves hosted at UN managed camps in Jordan: the Jabal
Al Hussein camp, the Jerash (Gaza) camp, and the Al Zaatari camp. Following
this analysis, we interrogate the spatial elements and orders that have arisen
and comprise what we term domestic refugee architecture.
The conclusion then explores arguments surrounding dispossession by dis-
cussing the evolution of the humanitarian design solution towards culturally
informed traditions and practices of vernacular architecture.

Methods

In this paper, an exploratory qualitative methodology for inquiry was used.11

The fieldwork carried out in refugee settlements was aimed at collecting ‘quali-
tative observations’.12 Subsequently, we employed a set of ‘data collection
tactics’ to investigate perceptions of the sites, each considered as a unit of
analysis.13
The fieldwork in question was carried out over a period of six months in
Amman, Jordan between October 2017 and April 2018. This fieldwork was
done in addition to undergoing ‘research internship’ in the UNRWA Head Quar-
ters in Amman ICIP (Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Department). Con-
strained by ethics guidelines, though our data collection methods aimed to
collect ‘qualitative observation’ data, we were unable to include refugee
input and as such our observations were primarily focused on physical traces.
In Jordan, three major waves of refugees were contained in UN planned
settlements, also called formal refugee camps, managed by UNRWA and
UNHCR: the two waves of Palestinian refugees (1948, 1967) and most
recent wave of Syrian refugees (2011). Within the scope of this research,
each camp is considered a separate ‘site’ presenting a different age bracket
and locality of the displaced settlements in Jordan. In this study, data collection
fieldwork was conducted in three sites, representing each wave. Studying the
Palestinian refugee camps could be considered a socio-spatial tool to under-
stand newer refugee camps. The three chosen camps were as follows.

The Jabal Al Hussein camp (established 1951; Arabic: ‫) ﻣﺨﻴﻢ ﺟﺒﻞ ﺍﻟﺤﺴﻴﻦ‬
Once on the periphery of the city Amman, today Jabal Al-Hussein camp is
engulfed by the city’s urban sprawl; it is an island of refugees located within
the capital of Jordan. Jabal Al Hussein Camp is located on 0.421 km2 of land
which was rented for 99 years to host 8,000 of the 1948 Al Nakba Palestinian
refugees who had been living in informal camps in Al-Mahatta, Jabal Al-Joffeh,
and Wadi Al-Seer. Designed by the UNRWA — established two years before the
 47 The Journal
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Volume 27
Number 1

1951 Refugee Convention — the Jabal Al Hussein camp is an exemplar of the

earlier operations of UNRWA and the more primitive attempts at creating con-
tainment systems and planned settlements. Jabal Al Hussein hosts many of the
1948 Nakba refugee communities, the majority of whom originate from Yaffa,
Haifa, Al-Lid, Ramlah, and the surrounding villages and towns. Four years after
the establishment of Jabal Al Hussein camp, the UNRWA built another camp
southeast of Amman, the New Amman Camp (also known as Al-Wehdat
camp), in order to relocate some of the Jabal Al Hussein camp residents and
regain control of the density of the camp. In 2018, the refugee population
of Jabal Al Hussein exceeded 32,000 refugees. The camp is co-managed by
the UNRWA and the Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA), a division of
the ‘Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates’ representing the
host government on the camp’s grounds.14

The Jerash (Gaza) camp (established 1968; Arabic: ‫) ﻣﺨﻴﻢ ﺟﺮﺵ ﻏﺰﺓ‬
Unlike the 1948 Palestinian refugee camps, the UNRWA was much better
equipped for containing the 1967 second wave of refugees, now called the
‘displaced Palestinians’, who flocked in from Palestine after the Six-Day War.
They were settled in planned settlements on the periphery and away from
urban centres.15 An example of this is the Jerash camp, commonly known as
the Gaza camp located on land a few kilometres south-west of the Roman
ruins of Jerash city, and south-east of Al Kitteh village. Jerash camp was estab-
lished in 1968 on 0.75 km2 of steeply sloped land in order to host 11,500 Pales-
tinians, most of whom had already been refugees in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip since 1948 and had been displaced again to Jordan. Most of the families in
the camp are descendants of either Bedouin or farmers’ tribes of Palestine,
namely the Tarabeen, Jbarat, Rmeilat, Jaraween, Hanajreh, and Sawarkeh
tribes. This camp, as with all Palestinian camps in Jordan, is co-managed by
the UNRWA and DPA. Today, Jerash Camp hosts over 29,000 registered refu-
gees, and is considered the poorest of all the Palestinian camps in Jordan.16

The Al Zaatari camp (established 2012; Arabic: ‫) ﻣﺨﻴﻢ ﺍﻟﺰﻋﺘﺮﻱ‬

A name emblematic of the Syrian Crisis, the Zaatari Refugee camp has become
one of the most iconic refugee camps in the world, symbolising the ‘left hand’
and the contemporary humanitarian project in Jordan. Despite this, the camp’s
name still causes a lot of confusion for the locals of Mafraq city, as there is a
village named Zaatari only a few kilometres away from the refugee camp.
The Zaatari refugee camp opened its doors on 29 July 2012 to host 78,804
(in 2019) refugees who fled to Jordan.17 The camp was established by JHCO
(Jordan Hashemite Charity Organisation), representing the Jordanian host
authority, and managed in partnership with UNHCR until SRAD (The Syrian
Refugee Affairs Directorate) took over in 2014. Data collection in the Jabal Al
Hussein and Jerash (Gaza) camps included guided surveys, documentation,
and drawings of over forty shelters, accompanied by UNRWA and field-office
engineers from the DPA. Fieldwork in Zaatari Camp also included guided
surveys and documentations, and drawings of over twenty shelters,
48 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

accompanied by basecamp engineers from the Norwegian Refugee Council

(hereafter NRC) under the provision and approval of the UNHCR and local
police.

The refugee camp as a humanitarian design solution

Post-crisis, displaced households find settlement in a variety of scenarios: dis-

persed self-settlement without legal status; host-family houses; self-settled
unplanned camps; short-term land, house, or apartment tenures; transit facili-
ties and collective centres; or planned and managed camps. In this article, we
will be limiting our discussion to the planned settlements managed by the
humanitarian sector, known as formal refugee camps. In order to understand
the specific cases of domestic refugee architecture in Jordan, we will interro-
gate the design solutions provided by the humanitarian sector to host displaced
communities and the consequent creation of the built environment of the
settlements.
Usually in the humanitarian sector, design processes aim to produce a
useful physical construction starting with identifying a geographical site
before imposing a programme, and a catalogue of user requirements and
demands. Yet the programme and the site can also be understood in the
context of the ‘fixed precepts and unwritten demands informed by a particu-
lar culture or a convention’.18 In our case, however, the humanitarian sector
excluded the perspective of the refugee communities from the process,
imposing the programme and design before realising the settlements in
coordination with the host governments and non-governmental organis-
ations (hereafter NGOs). With this in mind, we shall regard the humanitarian
sector as the architect of the humanitarian infrastructures known as the
refugee camps.
Given the consistent usage in humanitarian literature of the term refugees to
refer to the displaced communities — a victimising term which obscures both
political categorisation and cultural heritage — it is unsurprising that the blue-
prints of the humanitarian design solution were inspired by ‘military barracks’
and encampments rather than to draw reference from distinct cultural heri-
tages and relevant architectural practices.19 In addition to the priority of
immediate mass containment, the camps’ predetermined programme aims
to control the displaced communities by imposing spatial isolation, segre-
gation, and systemisation. For this reason, Liisa Malkki refers to camps and
planned settlements as post-war ‘vital device(s) of power’.20
The programme run by the humanitarian sector as architect is rigid and
restricted to serve displaced masses in a temporary emergency situation
without the functional malleability needed to accommodate the growing
demands of liminal refugee communities in protracted scenarios. As a result,
the humanitarian design solution is failing displaced communities, forcing
them to re-appropriate their dwellings and improvise solutions within the
narrow confines of the imposed structure.
 49 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Number 1

Morphology from a tent

The following section recounts the construction of the initial standardised

emergency shelters and the subsequent domestic refugee architecture which
arose over the course of protracted occupation by the displaced refugee com-
munities. By tracing the material transformation of the built environment, the
debates on the conception and temporality of shelter can be contextualised in
the transition from the humanitarian design solution to the current chaotic,
subversive, and improvised built structures. Following the 1948 Palestinian
exodus, the unofficial tented camps the refugees were settled in were difficult
to access for relief assistance and could not withstand the harsh winter storms
(Fig. 1). Despite this, any resettlement solutions provided by UNRWA faced
opposition by refugees who wanted to return to their homelands. The host
governments then demanded the containment of the refugees away from
the border for several economic and political reasons. This led to the transfer
of many Palestinian refugees to new, larger, and more central camps operated
by UNRWA in agreement with the host governments, one of which is the Jabal
Al-Hussein Camp (1951).21
Even though the Palestinian refugee communities opposed permanency,22
UNRWA reports show that a large number did want to move to the new
UNRWA camps for more readily available assistance.23 Whilst initially
UNRWA invested in tent-based housing rather than more permanent solutions
— even establishing a tent factory in the Jordan Valley — their strategy shifted
in the first two years to the production of more durable dwellings. The newly
founded UNRWA considered providing shelter an essential part of their huma-
nitarian relief work,24 but the politically charged landscape would not allow
long-term resettlement plans to be enacted.25
The early UNRWA housing policies were designed to contain and eventually
replace tents. These policies oscillated between supporting self-made construc-
tions by offering grants and building materials, providing single space struc-
tures called ‘rooms’, and setting up planned settlements comprising
demarcated plots and gridded prefabricated huts.26 Muna Budeiri claims that
this oscillation in UNRWA’s approach to providing shelter, along with the
early failures to accomplish large-scale shelter building programmes for refu-
gees’ needing ‘traditional family support networks’, led to the rise of self-
built family-based ‘clusters and quarters’. The ‘power of the community’,
Budeiri argues, forced UNRWA to change their top-down approach.27

Self-help approach to constructions

In early camps like Jabal Al Hussein, UNRWA distributed a variety of emergency
tents, sized according to the number of family members, to be placed in each
family’s assigned nomrah.28 Families would create vertical partitions with blan-
kets for more private sleeping arrangements, a habit also observed in refugee
dwellings during the fieldwork done for this research. Due to the harsh winter
storms and mud sliding over the sloped land, refugees resorted to constructing
one metre high sanasel (Arabic: ‫ﺳﻨﺎﺳﻞ‬, meaning terraces or short boulder walls
 50 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 1.
UNRWA archival images
documenting early 1950s camps in
Jordan, from UNRWA PhotoShelter
<https://unrwa.photoshelter.com/
galleries> [accessed 1 August
2020]

made of mud and stone), a common practice for fruit gardens and orchards in
Palestinian villages located on hilltops and upper slopes.29 Over time, refugees
started to extend the sanasel higher, eventually adding roofs made of zinco
(Arabic: ‫ﺯﻳﻨﻜﻮ‬, meaning corrugated metal sheets), thus creating spatial enclo-
sures.
In the early 1950s, UNRWA implemented the ‘refugee self-help’ approach
in the Jabal Al Hussein camp as well as the Irbid and Nuweimeh camps.
Aiming to work with the refugee communities’ demands, UNRWA provided
grants and construction materials to allow refugees to construct more perma-
nent shelters.30 As a result, refugees started to replace the sanasel with
cement block walls, building more complex enclosures and extensions in
the process (Fig. 2). The zinco roofs continued for decades afterwards as a
sign of temporality, becoming emblematic to the Palestinian camps as a
symbol of their permanent transit and liminality.31 Over the last decade, the
DPA has begun to allow vertical expansion of the shelters reaching up to
three storeys high, which has caused the camps to densify and extend to
yet another plane.32
The accumulated quick fixes over the next seven decades have allowed shel-
ters to become complex built structures in a state of constant densification.
These quick fixes came in a variety of forms, from solutions initiated by refugees
themselves and any number of short-term humanitarian construction enter-
prises, such as DPA shelter assistantships, UNRWA’s ‘self-help approach’, or
the various ‘camp improvement’ programmes that followed, such as the Infra-
structure and Camp Improvement Programme (ICIP).33 This resulted in the
domestic shelters of camps becoming heterogenous and often perceived as
chaotic due to their improvised construction and lack of uniformity (Fig. 3).
However, within the many building layers and materials, impermanent struc-
tures are still to be found — either zinco roofs or fabric doors – as a reminder
that it is still a refugee camp.

Hut camps
In 1956, following the first Palestinian exodus of 1948 and the creation of
UNRWA, the Technical Division in Lebanon developed a prototype ‘Hut
Camp Layout’ design. This design was a compromise which emerged out of
 51 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Number 1

Figure 2.
UNRWA archival images
documenting Jabal Al Hussein
camp in the 1960s, from UNRWA
PhotoShelter <https://unrwa.
photoshelter.com/galleries>
[accessed 1 August 2020]

the conflicting tensions of the refugee crisis which necessitated plans for a
longer-term occupation. The Hut Camp Layout was a comfortable middle
ground; founded on the impression of temporality, it provided refugees with
basic room-units for each nomrah, while creating the flexibility needed to
allow for the construction of additional rooms as required.34 When the Six
Day War erupted in 1967 the Jerash (Gaza) camp was created following the
Technical Division’s Hut Camp Layout, hosting the second wave of displaced
Palestinians from the Gaza district. Archival evidence, as compared with obser-
vations from the fieldwork, show that the one-room units were constructed
using prefabricated asbestos roofed with zinco (Fig. 4).35 These huts were
arranged in the nomrah of each family surrounding a centralised hosh (dis-
cussed below). Over the course of time, these initial Hut Camp Layouts were
developed further and grew into permanent structures with concrete block
walls.
Today in the Jerash (Gaza) camp, most of the prefabricated asbestos shel-
ters have been replaced by concrete block walls and zinco roofs placed on
wooden beams and weighed down with bricks. The concrete block walls
are rarely plastered or clad, and the rooms are often insulated only by
sealing the ceilings with a layer of fabric or cardboard. Nevertheless, the
camp preserves, to an extent, the order of the original prefabricated shelters
centred around a hosh space.

Prefabricated caravans
Managed by UNHCR, the Zaatari camp was initiated in 2012 as a tented camp
by the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organisation (JHCO) to host fleeing Syrian
refugees. Over time, however, the iconic blue and white UNHCR tents which
 52 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 3.
Jabal Al Hussein camp zinco roofed
shelter, photographed by author
Dima M. Hanna, 2018

formed the majority of the camp proved problematic, being unable withstand
the harsh weather of the Mafraq desert, especially the 2015 winter snow-
storms. In response, humanitarian inter-agency winterisation assistance was
mobilised.36
During the following year, tents were slowly replaced by single space prefab-
ricated caravans, similar in design to the UNRWA huts (Fig. 5). The caravans
were made from double sandwiched corrugated metal sheets and often
placed on raised metal frames. Another factsheet document published by
UNHCR in November 2015 reported that 70% of the shelters (caravans and
tents) experienced flooding while 52% were considered unsuitable for
winter.37
The humanitarian sector continues to maintain the fragile caravans, arran-
ging and rearranging them under the ‘Camp Restructure Project’ to a grid
organisation in each of the twelve districts.38 However, the refugees them-
selves have managed to re-appropriate the space into more liveable situ-
ations by moving the caravans into introverted C-, L-, or H-shapes, and
adding rooms by using inexpensive single-layer zinco sheets and spreading
a thin layer of concrete on the ground for flooring. Humanitarian organis-
ations like the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC hereafter) embraced the
changes, providing shelter construction maintenance and encouraging the
recycling of the disposed UNHCR tents and waste as building materials
(Fig. 6).39

Spatial order of refugee architecture

Disregarding romantic notions about the built environment and implausible

discourses on architecture which assume an aesthetic value, how shall we
 53 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Number 1

Figure 4.
(right) Archival UNRWA
photograph of the asbestos huts in
Jordan, from UNRWA PhotoShelter
<https://unrwa.photoshelter.com/
galleries> [accessed 1 August
2020]; (left) remaining asbestos hut
in the same camp, photographed
by author Dima M. Hanna, 2018

approach the self-appropriated lived-in spaces of refugee camps? As architec-

ture, or ‘chaos’?40
Building surfaces are what create spatial enclosures within which we experi-
ence and function. In a refugee camp, the physical enveloping surfaces of the
built environment are neither an imposed artistic expression, nor have an intrin-
sic aesthetic value. The refugee buildings are instead the direct result of the
necessity to fulfil the urgent functional needs within the imposed humanitarian
solutions.41 Yet the additions by the refugees to the built environment of the
camp — chaotic and improvised, loaded with cultural significance, subversions
of the original ‘humanitarian design solution’— are what creates domestic
refugee architecture.
In dense and aggregated built environments like refugee camps, refugee
architecture is frequently defined by the irregular physical surfaces of contain-
ment: ‘haphazard piecemeal’ 42 and ‘informal’.43 Critics have disparaged the
spatial occupation and modification patterns of the refugee communities in
the camps as ‘squating’44 or ‘encroaching’,45 becoming a ‘spatial violation’
and a ‘deviation’46 from the humanitarian design solution. This rhetoric
denies any attempt to understand the socio-spatial relations of a camp, and
pushes displaced communities further into the ‘non-place’ that their culturally
and politically defaced label of refugee implies.47 Given the obvious flaws of
such an approach, this research shall instead argue for an alternative under-
standing of architecture based on socio-spatial relations to define domestic
refugee architecture. One way that such architecture can become ‘intelligible’
is by exploring ‘the order of the building, as defined by its repetitive elements
and relations’.48

Architecture as a site of ‘many returns’

Historically, refugee camps originated as a post-Second World War Western
solution to the problem of refugee crises, becoming ‘emplaced as a standar-
dised, generalisable, technology of power in the management of mass displa-
cement’.49 The humanitarian body imposed their emergency order — using
tools such as the nomrah grid, demarcating roads, service areas, and
apportioned space — as the method of creating stability in situations of
mass containment. Over time, however, these emergency infrastructures
were forced to accommodate a growing population, while the refugees them-
selves have challenged the imposed orders by reconstructing and reconstituting
the camps with their notions of home. The added spatial elements, drawn from
the refugees’ own knowledge of traditional domestic architecture, which have
 54 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 5.
Caravans’ rearrangement in Zaatari
Camp, in Ghada Barakat, ‘Site
Planning and Shelter: Camp
Restructure Project Report of
Zaatari Refugee Camp’, UNHCR,
April 2016 <https://data2.unhcr.
org/en/documents/download/
47917> [accessed 1 August 2020]

been passed on from generation to generation within the family or community

about construction and design, are physical signs of an intangible heritage in a
culture of ‘many returns’, as glimpses of home in a state of permanent transit.50
Although restricted by the humanitarian disposition of mass housing that pre-
sumes impermanence, today the camps in Jordan carry clear spatial elements of
the traditional domestic architecture of their homelands.
Due to the complex nature of the built environment in refugee camps, we
have adopted a definition of elements that stems from an understanding of
architecture as a container of socio-spatial inhabitation: ‘the spatial design
components that contain a particular function within an order’.51 This defi-
nition also serves as a deeper analysis of the lived-in spaces contained by the
physical mass and shaped by formal and informal structures built in response
to needs.

Elements of ‘domestic refugee architecture’

Based on our framework, the following sections discuss observations made

in the camps to identify the spatial elements and explore the socio-spatial
orders of the refugee dwellings in Jordan. The following definitions are
attempts to untangle the complex built environment of domestic
refugee architecture that developed within the narrow lines of the given
humanitarian design solution, instigated by the traditional practices of the
region.

The nomrah
The term nomrah [ ‫ ]ﻧُﻤ ّﺮﺓ‬means ‘a number’ in Arabic, however in the context of
a refugee camp, it is used to describe the land parameters allotted to each of
 55 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Number 1

Figure 6.
Morphology diagram of refugee
shelters in case study camps, drawn
by author Dima M. Hanna, 2019

the first registered refugee families in which they place their tents or temporary
shelters. Although other research has referred to it as the ‘camp’s grid’,52
‘allotted plots layout’,53 ‘house hold plot’,54 ‘aforementioned delineated
lines’,55 and ‘superimposed grid’,56 this article uses the Arabic name brought
about and used by the camp communities and on-the-ground aid workers
(Fig. 7). The term nomrah is specific to camps in the region and constitutes a
significant concept and aspect of the spatial awareness of any camp resident.
By choosing to live in adjacent nomrahs, the first generation of refugees
stayed close to people from their hometowns and extended relatives.57 Even
though shelters transformed over time, each ‘refugee family’ remained
bound to dwell within their assigned nomrah. The nomrah became a spatial
unit and legal marker in the camp’s geography, used to determine the
allowed floor surface for each family shelter. In protracted camps like Jabal
Al Hussein which has grown into overcrowded urban spaces, the nomrah
lines are relied on to counterpose the volatile tendency for shelters to expand
and overspill their limits. This invisible outline on the camp’s ground ends any
spatial negotiation, trapping the growing families inside. Any overspill
becomes an official violation and an act of transgression against the humanitar-
ian organisation.
The Palestinian camps in Jordan are usually divided into ‘blocks’ separated
by narrow roads or pathways, with each block formed of two rows of
nomrah.58 In the Jabal Al Hussein camp, each nomrah is 10 × 10 m; in the
 56
Figure 7.
Spatial analysis of refugee domestic
architecture mapping done in Jabal
Al Hussein camp, Jerash (Gaza)
camp, and Zaatari camp, drawn by
author Dima M. Hanna, 2019
Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar
Jerash (Gaza) camp it is 8 × 12 m; while in the Syrian refugee camp Zaatari
(2012), there was an attempt to impose a 10 × 10 m nomrah. To further
understand the nomrah fragmentation, it is useful to refer to the 1962
UNRWA guidelines document ‘Camp Site and Layout’, which illustrates the
standardised two-dimensional blueprint that guided the building of Palesti-
nian refugee camps (Fig. 8). The recommended nomrah dimensions — or
what the documentation calls the ‘allotted plots’ — are 8 × 10 m per family
for tented camps and 14 × 7.5 m per family for hutted camps. The assigned
nomrahs were to be distributed in two-row linear grids, which is based on
the ‘Western experience’ of settlements.59 The UNRWA guidelines included
the recommendations for the plots not to be ‘too generous’ to avoid the
possibility of subletting unused land and creating a higher density than antici-
pated.60
The way shelters started to extend to multiple floors can be most clearly
observed in the 1967 Jerash (Gaza) camp, where some families started splitting
their nomrah into halves called nos-nomrah [ ‫ ]ﻧﺺ ﻧﻤﺮﺓ‬to accommodate second-
or third-generation family members, such as a son’s family, who needed a sep-
arate dwelling. Additionally, many refugees started selling and exchanging
their nos-nomrah through the practice of a mobaya’a [ ‫]ﻣﺒﺎﻳﻌﺔ‬, an unofficial con-
tract witnessed by two people and signed by the Mukhtar [‫( ]ﻣﺨﺘﺎﺭ‬a community
leader). These practices of nomrah fragmentation contributed to the ever-
growing density in camps.
By contrast, the Zaatari Camp does not show a very clear nomrah grid (Fig. 9).
Although its planning was based on a grid, the newer camp has a much more
fluid urban form. Syrian refugees use the suspended nature of the temporary
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caravans — the corrugated metal single space containers — to disrupt the orig- Figure 8.
Suggested layout drawing showing
inal gridded distribution by moving them into various combinations creating
the standardised two-dimensional
spaces similar to the hosh (to be discussed below). This spatial practice has chal- blueprint that guided the building
lenged the caravan reallocation efforts of the NRC camp restructure project of future Palestinian refugee
(2016), which aimed to connect shelters to communal services and utilities camps, Section 7(i), UNRWA
by moving the shelters to gridded household plots.61 In Zaatari, the number Guidelines ‘Camp Site and Layout’,
1962, reproduced with permission
and organisation of caravans dictate the land plot shape.

Sittara
The sittara [ ‫ ]ﺳﺘﺎﺭﺓ‬is a spatial element that refugees add to shelters to imitate a
transitional element that separates the private from the public, a practice which
they have brought with them from their home region’s traditional domestic
architecture. Even though it is considered a building violation in most cases,
constructing a sittara is culturally important to refugees in Jordan.
In Classical Arabic, sittara means a curtain or drapery; however, in spoken
Arabic it means to conceal the women living within a household to protect
their privacy. This is a concept specific to the culture of the Arab world
where women are required to wear a hijab [ ‫ ] ﺣﺠﺎﺑ‬in the male-dominated
public sphere, or around men who are not immediate family members.62 In
the extremely dense camps, however, refugees often build a sittara, an inter-
mediate space shielding the inside of the shelter from the outside, to serve
as an entrance area. A sittara is a veil for the shelter that can be covered
with a canopy and include multiple small gates, raised or depressed thresholds,
built-in seating, laundry lines, and m’arasheh [ ‫( ] ﻣﻌﺮﺷﺔ‬a framework for climbing
plants such as grape vines).
In the Jabal Al Hussein Camp, constructing a sittara is considered a form of
transgression if it spills over the nomrah lines into the public space. The DPA
camp office registers a sittara as a building violation and issues citations to
 58
Figure 9.
Shelters rearrangement allowing
for the creation of a service road
under the ‘Camp Restructure
Project’ in District 10 in Zaatari
Camp, in Ghada Barakat, ‘Site
Planning and Shelter: Camp
Restructure Project Report of
Zaatari Refugee Camp’, UNHCR,
April 2016 <https://data2.unhcr.
org/en/documents/download/
47917> [accessed 1 August 2020]
Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar
the municipality, as with any other building violations. However, due to the
depoliticised and humanitarian nature of camps, in addition to the inability
to provide alternative housing solutions, these citations are often disregarded
or neglected (Figs. 10 and 11). In the newer Jerash (Gaza) camp, density is
not as high as in Jabal Al Hussein, and the shelters’ nomrah areas host
smaller families. Therefore, the two camps’ concept of sittara differ, as it is
not an obvious overspill to the outside in Jerash, but an intermediate space
created inside the shelter itself immediately after the main door, sometimes
just by adding an actual curtain (Fig. 12). Entrance areas are often partnered
with an elevated two- to five-step threshold.
Zaatari is the newest camp, meaning that the shelters’ physical forms are
more fluid, though there are numerous parallels between the Zaatari and
Jerash Camps shelters’ spatial elements. One example of this is the sittara in
both camps are often made simply of fabric. In Zaatari, the lack of building
materials, extreme poverty, and lower density resulted in a simpler architectural
form and more straightforward spatial problem-solving, where domestic shel-
ters are made from single-spaced prefabricated caravans, corrugated metal
sheets, old UN tents, and blankets. Refugees were able to move the donated
caravans between 2013 and 2016, position them, and create semi-public inter-
mediate spaces, bathrooms, and kitchens. Entrance areas were often created as
the result of a designed negative space between the carefully positioned cara-
vans, separated from the outside by blankets or metal sheets (Fig. 13).
In most cultures, entrance doors are a planar elements that are part of walls,
which can be opened, closed or locked; however, in the Arab region, the resi-
dential entrance doors, or in our case the sittara, are spaces intended to create
privacy and the segregation of genders.63 Entrance doors separate the public
from the semi-public, and also encompass preceding and succeeding buffer
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spaces such as elevated loggias, colonnades, and porches. They are usually fol- Figure 10.
Citation documents of shelters with
lowed by a skewed corridor or a yard that leads to the deeper parts of a house
sittaras (the names of the refugees
which offer no direct view to the outside.64 Reem Zako recounts that, amongst covered for privacy), Jabal Al
the many physical forms that project the need for privacy and segregation in Hussein Camp field office,
the traditional domestic architecture of the region, the ‘placement of doors Department of Palestinian Affairs,
within the street’ with muted facades best describes why refugees in Jordan photographed by author Dima
M. Hanna with permission from
invested in appropriating their shelters by adding sittaras.65 Such a spatial
DPA, 2017
element might not be of great urgency to the survival of displaced families
but carry great social and cultural importance.

The hosh
The traditional spatial element of the hosh [ ‫ ] ﺍﻟﺤﻮﺷ‬can be simply explained as
the central courtyard within a house; it is the element that orders all the other
domestic spaces around it. This traditionally intrinsic element of domestic archi-
tecture has been interpreted in multiple forms within the camps’ refugee dwell-
ings.
Considering the Middle East’s climate and lack of public spaces, houses offer
a balance between the ‘protection of privacy rather than [the] seclusion’ of
women and children and the possibility of hosting social events to include
the extended family.66 Traditionally, during the day, women perform their
activities and chores in the open space of the hosh without inhibition, with chil-
dren, other female neighbours, or family members. At night, the hosh becomes
a meeting place for the entire family or a space to host social events.67 To
achieve this sensitive permeability, houses juxtapos the private spaces of
women and children deeper inside using a hosh. The main openings and
other smaller semi-public spaces (like the iwan and riwaq)68 are positioned to
face the hosh rather than the outside to control visitors’ field of vision with
screens, depressed or raised floor levels, and sometimes multiple storeys. As
a result, houses are multi-cellular, introverted, centralised in organisation,
and grow organically.
Although Jabal Al Hussein’s tight demarcation of shelters in rows and its
very high density forced the organising bodies — the UNRWA and DPA —
to allow vertical expansions up to two floors, the tight divisions of shelter
 60 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 11.
Sittara spilling over the public space
in Jabal Al Hussein Camp,
photographed and analysed by
author Dima M. Hanna, 2017

spaces remain around a space that mimics the traditional hosh. The hosh-
like spaces are often double-volumed, loosely covered, semi-public, con-
taining water tanks, washing machines, and laundry lines. These allow
for an introverted central circulation, where the windows and doors of
the other rooms are accessible through it, rather than through apparently
more logical openings in the external facade. Inside shelters, the treatment
of doors and windows also mimic the openings of a hosh, often including
sun-breakers and rainwater thresholds. It was also observed that despite
the high density, multiple storeys, and the need for rainwater insulation,
many houses kept a central skylight opening (Fig. 14). In many cases, cover-
ing the hosh-like space happened in later stages of appropriating the
shelter.
It is important to note that in this camp, stairs followed the same organising
order of the hosh. Even with the tight divisions and high density, multiple
narrow steep staircases were built: one in the sittara for the visitors, and
others in the hosh-like space for family members. For that reason, the staircase
often starts in the middle of a house and extends up towards the entrance, with
its highest point immediately behind the door area, leaving visitors with per-
spectives shaped by traditional architecture feeling that the staircase is
flipped or mirrored.
After the first wave of Palestinian Refugee camps of 1948, UNRWA was far
more prepared for the second wave of Palestinian refugees in 1968 with
regards to camp layout and shelter specifications. A 1962 UNRWA ‘Camp
Site and Layout’ document stated that:
The design of the huts adopted accounted for a central living area in privacy, i.e.
an internal courtyard with the side of the dwelling facing the street presenting a
blank wall to passers-by. A wall enclosing the plot is one of the first additions built
to basic shelter by the refugees.69
Therefore, when the Jerash (Gaza) Camp was built in 1968, tents were soon
replaced by huts arranged around a courtyard, as mentioned above. By
2018, most of the huts’ walls had been replaced by more permanent walls
that roughly followed the same layout. It was observed that the refugees
kept the hosh space as the largest space in shelters, and that the hosh was
often empty, maintaining a fluid functionality that transformed with its users
and the time of day. It was also loosely covered (if at all) a double volume, con-
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Figure 12.
Inside a sittara created by adding a
curtain in Jerash (Gaza) camp,
photographed and analysed by
author Dima M. Hanna, 2018

tained water tanks and laundry, and was central to the introverted circulation
(Fig. 15).
Syrian refugees in the Zaatari camp claimed the negative spaces between
caravans. As such, creating a hosh became a question of positioning the car-
avans. Most families placed their caravans in the more common H-shape
shelter using two opposing caravans, the L-shape shelter using two adjacent
caravans, or the C-shape shelter using three caravans to create an enclosure
space similar to a hosh. Due to the location of Zaatari in the harsh Eastern
desert, most hosh-like spaces were covered either by re-used UN tent fabric
or corrugated metal sheets. Although uncommon to the region, Syrian refu-
gees tended to use a pitched roof design, probably as a result of the restricted
availability of building materials and structural limitations. Similar to the tra-
ditional hosh, it has a fluid functionality that organises spaces and circulation
around it (Fig. 16).
Friedrich Ragette describes the organic morphology of settlements in the
Arab World as ‘irregular’ in shape. Dwellings often start with an exterior yard
or terrace around the smallest unit, the bait, which has often been translated
as the ‘house’ but should instead refer to the ‘dwelling unit’ or ‘room’. As
the household grows, more units ‘aggregate’ around the courtyard, or the
hosh, making it central to the interior organisation and a breathing point;
 62 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 13.
Sittara area in Zaatari camp,
photographed by author Dima M.
Hanna, 2018

this arrangement is also referred to as a bait. Further buffer yards and passages
might lead to other adjacent baits for other relatives. Traditional Arab settle-
ments can be ‘seen as a maze of baits’ grouped in a very compact manner
and connected by tight semi-public lanes and pathways that link together in
an open common-space or a square, creating a hara [ ‫( ] ﺣﺎﺭﺓ‬a quarter or neigh-
bourhood).70 In a neighbourhood, people know each other and can be con-
sidered as one social entity.
The UNRWA’s ‘Space, time, dignity and rights’ exhibition publication men-
tions the hosh as a common feature of early refugee shelters. It describes the
formal transformation of the shelter as the result of increasing densification:
‘Once the spatial resources for horizontal expansion were exhausted, families
began to expand vertically. This led to the internalisation of the courtyard,
forming an internal living and circulation area that connects all the functions
of the house.’71 As seen in the Jerash (Gaza) camp, the hosh is preserved as
the fundamental element of an introverted organisation, as it orders the
other spaces around it. In both the Zaatari and the Jabal Al Hussein camps,
the hosh was transformed into an internal space and disappeared as an open
central courtyard. However, it remained as a spatial order central to the circula-
tion and organisation of the household.

The hamam
Arabic for bathroom or latrine, the hamam [ ‫] ﺍﻟﺤ ّﻤﺎﻣ‬, is a spatial element that
achieves the transition from the basic communal toilets provided by the huma-
nitarian bodies to private ones inside the dwellings, acting as an indicator of the
autonomy of refugee communities. It is important to understand the position-
ing of toilets in or around the refugee shelters. Nowadays, the older Palestinian
camps, like Jabal Al Hussein, have managed to connect their self-built and now
improved hamams to the sewage network of the capital city, Amman, as it
engulfed the camp. By contrast, Jerash has only a very basic sewage network
 63 The Journal
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Figure 14.
Hosh-like spaces in Jabal Al Hussein
camp, photographed by author
Dima M. Hanna, 2018

which disposes of the waste of each shelters’ hamams and relies on aid pro-
grammes for funding. Budeiri reports that most infrastructure systems in Pales-
tinian camps, including sewage, are ‘substandard in their appropriateness and
fitness for the purpose’.72
Still, in any emergency planned settlement guidelines — whether the
1962 UNRWA ‘Camp Site and Layout’ document or the most recent
UNHCR shelter design catalogue73 — shelters conceived as family dwellings
remain singular room constructions serviced by communal hamams ‘suffi-
ciently close to [refugee] dwellings’.74 In the Zaatari camp, fluidity
becomes an opportunity to explore the relationship of hamams to shelters.
In 2014, UNHCR, UNICEF, ACTED, JEN, OXFAM, and REACH published a
document outlining the minimum standards for the Water and Sanitation
for Health (hereafter WASH) in Zaatari. One of the indicators was that
‘there should be a minimum of one functioning toilet for every 50
persons at the camp level’. However, in the last section of the report, it
states that:
The Za’atari Refugee community has demonstrated a strong preference for
undertaking many activities planned for communal facilities at the household
level including preparing food, washing clothes, bathing and use of latrines …
although currently unsupported and undocumented. Private facilities are
included here primarily as indicators as they tell of the realities of the camp and
highlight potential issues related to infrastructure management and risks to
health, however there are no targets attached to them.75
And in 2017, ACTED reported that:
 64 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 15.
Hosh spaces in Jerash (Gaza) camp,
photographed and analysed by
author Dima M. Hanna, 2018

The unsupervised construction of private toilets by refugees, regardless of

hygiene standards, poses a great sanitary threat. ACTED determined that approxi-
mately 3922 private toilets in the camp do not comply with the minimum hygiene
standards.76
In Zaatari, self-made hamams have caused great hardships, partly from poor
hygiene due to the small volume of water provided for each family. Refugee
families showed shame when we visited their hamam to document it for the
research (Fig. 17). In Zaatari, refugees appropriated their shelters by digging
a septic tank next to their caravans, sealing the sandy desert ground with a
thin layer of concrete, and placing a squatting toilet fixture on top of a hole.
Each household shelter is connected to a water tank fed weekly by water
trucks. In Zaatari, each household consumes 35 litres per day,77 compared to
80–100 litres per day for each person in Jordan.78 A portion of that water is
used for toilet sanitation using plastic buckets.
Koolhaas et al. consider the toilet space to be the ‘ultimate element’, as it is
the space of the most fundamental and intimate interaction between humans
and architecture, yet it is ‘enshrined’ with a technological device connected to
a plumbing network used on average six to eight times a day.79 In Islamic and
Middle Eastern cultures, using a hamam is even more intimate, as its use is
dictated by a fatwa (Islamic code of conduct) that includes twelve different
rules, including positioning rooms as not to face Mecca, the sun or moon,
and complete silence and privacy.80 Whether considered as a device or an
architectural element, hamams and their related space are rarely factored in
design analysis, especially when discussing shelters. Still, when tracing the
evolution of space in refugee camps, building a hamam inside a shelter is
one of the principal markers in the transition from the standardised humani-
tarian design solution to a reinterpretation of traditional domestic architec-
ture.
The humanitarian design solution dictates a minimal disruption of the rented
land on which the refugee camps are built. Elements that require connectivity
to a mechanical network like toilets are considered an unwelcome disruption
 65 The Journal
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Figure 16.
Hosh-like spaces in Zaatari camp,
photographed by author Dima
M. Hanna, 2018

Figure 17.
Self-made toilets in the Zaatari
camp, photographed by author
Dima M. Hanna, 2018

(Fig. 18). A hamam’s location, whether inside a shelter or outside, can be con-
sidered a significant cultural marker of the extent of refugee autonomy.

Conclusion

When discussing the current built environment in a protracted refugee situ-

ation, particularly the predominant domestic built environment, researchers
(who are often also aid workers) tend to position their arguments by referen-
cing the design solutions provided by the humanitarian sector and the con-
clusions of encroachment and violation which have been captured in the
earlier section discussing the spatial order of the camps. These arguments
are based on an understanding of the built environment as a body of surfaces,
boundaries, and assigned functions, but not as set of socio-spatial needs that
are fulfilled by the creation of new spatial enclosures and the lived-in experi-
ence of the displaced communities in question.
To untangle the aggregated spaces, our interrogation relied on an under-
standing architecture as containers of socio-cultural activities and values,
rather than the aesthetic value of their construction. Under this socio-spatial
 66 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

Figure 18.
Field notes about hammam in
Zaatari camp, drawn by author
Dima M. Hanna, 2018

light we present a new perspective on refugee shelters and a reinterpretation of

traditional domestic architecture of the region. As refugees transformed shel-
ters over time, some spatial elements were transferred and reinterpreted, in
one way or another, from the traditional domestic architecture of their home-
lands. These elements came to play within the imposed humanitarian solutions.
Four core spatial elements were discussed in length: the nomrah, sittara, hosh,
and hamam.
Though often perceived as chaotic, these elements are tangible and intelligi-
ble to those who live within the space of the camp and embody a transference
of cultural significance to places defined by necessity. As such, while displace-
ment for refugee communities may mean geographic and physical disposses-
sion from a homeland, it does not necessarily imply social and cultural
dispossession. An overview of our three case studies shows that a refuge is
not restricted to offering shelter for human bodies isolated from culture and
traditions. While this may initially be the case, protracted scenarios lead to
refugee communities disrupting the orders of a camp and challenging the
imposed humanitarian design solution by appropriating and reconstituting
their shelters. Regardless of the level of protraction and materials at hand,
refugee communities borrow from their traditional domestic architecture and
practices to fulfil their spatial needs and create what can be defined as domestic
refugee architecture.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the PhD dissertation of Dima Hanna, the first author,
with the title ‘Refugee Architecture: A Sociospatial Reading of Planned Huma-
nitarian Settlements in Jordan’, supervised by the second and third authors of
this article.
 67 The Journal
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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Zentrum, 2012).
32. Budeiri, ‘Dynamics of Space’, p. 190.
33. Ibid. p. 1 95; Philipp Misselwitz and Sari Hanafi, ‘Testing a New Paradigm: UNRWA’s Camp
Improvement Programme’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 28 (2009), 360–88 <http://dx.doi.
org/10.1093/rsq/hdp039> [accessed 1 August 2020]
34. Berg, ‘The Unending Temporary’, p. 111.
35. UNRWA Photoshelter, Images and Films Galleries <https://unrwa.photoshelter.com>
[accessed 1 August 2020]; Samar Maqusi, ‘“Space of Refuge”: Negotiating Space with
Refugees Inside the Palestinian Camp’, Humanities, 6 (2017), 60 <http://dx.doi.org/10.
3390/h6030060>
36. Charlie Dunmore, ‘Winter Storms Bring More Hardship to Refugees in Jordan’s Za’atari
Camp’, 9 January 2015 <https://www.unhcr.org/54affcf59.html> [accessed 1 August
2020]; ‘Zaatari Refugee Camp Winter Response November 2015 – February 2016’,
UNHCR, 1 November 2015 <https://reliefweb.int/report/jordan/zaatari-refugee-camp-
winter-response-november-2015-february-2016> [accessed 1 August 2020]; ‘Jordan
 69 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Number 1

Refugee Response: Inter-Agency Winterization Update’, UNHCR and the Inter-agency

Winterisation Task Force, 12 January 2015 <https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/
download/42976> [accessed 1 August 2020]; ‘Amid Brutal Winter, Safe Births for Syrian
Refugees’, United Nations Population Fund, 2 February 2015 <https://www.unfpa.org/
news/amid-brutal-winter-safe-births-syrian-refugees> [accessed 1 August 2020]
37. ‘Zaatari Refugee Camp Winter Response’, UNHCR.
38. Ghada Barakat, ‘Site Planning and Shelter: Camp Restructure Project Report of Zaatari
Refugee Camp’, UNHCR, April 2016, p. 11 <https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/
download/47917> [accessed 1 August 2020]
39. Ibid.
40. Berg, ‘From Chaos to Order and Back’, p. 109.
41. Alnsour and Meaton, ‘Housing Conditions’, p. 69.
42. Ibid., p. 65.
43. Romola Sanyal, ‘Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement’, International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (2013), 558–72 (p. 558) <http://dx.doi.org/
10.1111/1468-2427.12020>
44. Ayham Dalal and others, ‘Planning the Ideal Refugee Camp: A Critical Interrogation of
Recent Planning Innovations in Jordan and Germany’, Urban Planning, 3 (2018), 67
<http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/up.v3i4.1726>; Sanyal, ‘Urbanizing Refuge’, pp. 877–90
(p. 561).
45. Budeiri, ‘Dynamics of Space’, p. 190.
46. Maqusi, ‘Space of Refuge’; Dalal and others, ‘Planning the Ideal Refugee Camp’.
47. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 51.
48. Mahbub Rashid, ‘On Space Syntax as a Configurational Theory of Architecture from a Situ-
ated Observer’s Viewpoint’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 39.4
(2012), 732–54 <http://doi.org/10.1068/b37071>
49. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile’, p. 498.
50. Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Spatial Ordering of Exile: The Architecture of Palestinian
Refugee Camps, public seminar, introduced by Ann Stoler, 1 December 2014 <https://
publicseminar.org/2014/12/spatial-ordering-of-exile-the-architecture-of-palestinian-
refugee-camps/> [accessed 1 August 2020]; Hilal and Petti, Permanent Temporariness
(Stockholm: Royal Institute of Art, Art and Theory Publishing, 2018), p. 170.
51. Leupen and others, Design and Analysis, p. 24.
52. Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, ‘The Palestinian Refugee Camps: the Promise of “Ruin” and
“Loss”’, Rethinking History, 19 (2014), 72–94 (p. 72) <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/
13642529.2014.913941>
53. ‘Appendix to Letter From Chief, UNRWA.
54. Ghada Barakat, ‘Site Planning and Shelter’, UNHCR.
55. Maqusi, ‘Space of Refuge’.
56. Misselwitz and Hanafi, ‘Testing a New Paradigm’, pp. 360–88.
57. Budeiri, ‘Dynamics of Space’, p. 190; Rueff and Viaro, ‘Palestinian Refugee Camps’, p. 140.
58. Misselwitz, Space, Time, Dignity and Rights, p. 20.
59. Friedrich Ragette, Traditional Domestic Architecture of the Arab Region (Fellbach: Edition
Axel Menges, 2003), p. 244.
60. ‘Appendix to Letter from Chief, UNRWA, part 1.
61. Ghada Barakat, ‘Site Planning and Shelter’, UNHCR.
62. Ragette, Traditional Domestic Architecture, p. 75.
63. Amiry and Tamari, The Palestinian Village Home, p. 27.
64. Ragette, Traditional Domestic Architecture, p. 75.
70 Domestic refugee architecture in Jordan
Dima M. Hanna, Laurie Buys and Anoma Kumarasuriyar

65. Reem Zako, ‘The Power of the Veil’, in Courtyard Housing Past, Present and Future, ed. by
Brian Edwards and others (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006), pp. 87–111 (p. 110).
66. Ragette, Traditional Domestic Architecture, p. 76.
67. Amiry and Tamari, The Palestinian Village Home, p. 17.
68. Ibid.
69. ‘Appendix to Letter From Chief, UNRWA, part 3 section D.
70. Ragette, Traditional Domestic Architecture, p. 49; Atillio Petruccioli, ‘The Courtyard
House’, in Courtyard Housing Past, Present and Future, ed. by Brian Edwards and others
(London: Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. 3.
71. Misselwitz, Space, Time, Dignity and Rights, p. 26.
72. Budeiri, ‘Dynamics of Space’, p. 191.
73. ‘Shelter Design Catalogue’, UNHCR Shelter and Settlement Section, Division of Pro-
gramme Support and Management, January 2016, pp. 7–66 <https://cms.emergency.
unhcr.org/documents/11982/57181/Shelter+Design+Catalogue+January+2016/
a891fdb2-4ef9-42d9-bf0f-c12002b3652e> [accessed 1 August 2020].
74. The Sphere Project: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian
Response (Rugby: The Sphere Project, Practical Action Publishing, 2011), pp. 104–10
(p. 107) <https://www.unhcr.org/50b491b09.pdf> [accessed 1 August 2020].
75. ‘Minimum Standards for Zaatari WASH Sector‘, UNICEF in partnership with ACTED, JEN
and Oxfam, Final Version 1, 15 September 2014, p. 8 <https://data2.unhcr.org/en/
documents/details/42429> [accessed 1 August 2020].
76. ‘Shelter Intervention Snapshot, Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan, November 2017’, ACTED,
4 January 2018 <https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/61479> [accessed 1
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77. ‘Jordan Factsheet 2017’, UNHCR.
78. ’ 2017),’ ‫ ﻟﺘﺮﴽ‬٤٠ – ٢٠ ‫ ‘ )ﺍﻧﺨﻔﺎﺽ ﺣﺼﺔ ﺍﻟﻔﺮﺩ ﺍﻷﺭﺩﻧﻲ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﻤﻴﺎﻩ ﺑﻴﻦ‬Hala News, 8 February 2017
<https://www.hala.jo/100323/> [accessed 1 August 2020].
79. World Toilet Organisation data cited in Rem Koolhaas and others, Toilet, Elements of
Architecture #11 (Venice: Marsilio, 2014), p. 103.
80. Ragette, Traditional Domestic Architecture, p. 73.