Refugee Camp for Syrians in Jordan Evolves as a Do-It-Yourself City
AMMONNEWS - A young Syrian salesman stopped into Ahmad Bidawi’s barbershop for a shave the other day. Music wafted on fan-cooled air. Outside, on what has become the main commercial strip here in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, workers steered handcarts packed with lumber and kitchen appliances through sunbaked crowds hanging out in front of shops.
The scene could hardly have felt further from the mayhem across the border that Mr. Bidawi, like the other refugees, fled. Syria is only a few miles away. From the camp one can feel the shelling. A farmer back home and jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Bidawi arrived here with his wife and children a year ago, only to have his youngest daughter die in the camp, overwhelmed by tear gas fired when guards struggled to quell a riot. Everyone in Zaatari has horror stories about homes destroyed, family members lost and bad times in the camp.
But now, at a pace stunning to see, Zaatari is becoming an informal city: a sudden, do-it-yourself metropolis of roughly 85,000 with the emergence of neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp officials are scrambling to copy.
The change, accelerated by regional chaos and enterprising Syrians, illustrates a basic civilizing push toward urbanization that clearly happens even in desperate places — people leaving their stamp wherever they live, making spaces they occupy their own. At the same time, Zaatari’s evolution points more broadly to a whole new way of thinking about one of the most pressing crises on the planet.
In June, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number of refugees worldwide in 2013 topped 50 million, the most since World War II, a figure substantially increased by the Syrian conflict. Add to that one million Iraqis displaced during the first months of this year.
These vast forced migrations have accelerated discussions about the need to treat camps as more than transitional population centers, more than human holding pens with tents for transients. A number of forward-thinking aid workers and others are looking at refugee camps as potential urban incubators, places that can grow and develop and even benefit the host countries — places devised from the get-go to address those countries’ long-term needs — rather than become drags on those nations.
Such thinking is driven by reality: Syrian and Iraqi families, with no clear path to peace, and no other choice, their countries coming undone, find themselves facing extended exile in places like Zaatari, which the refugees are in effect retrofitting out of necessity to serve their immediate needs.
“You can call a place like Zaatari impermanent and not build adequate infrastructure,” as Don Weinreich, a partner at Ennead Architects in New York, recently put it. Ennead is collaborating with the United Nations refugee agency and Stanford University to reimagine how, and where, refugee camps around the world should, or shouldn’t, be planned and built.
“But organic development, driven by refugees, is unstoppable,” Mr. Weinreich said. “Impermanence costs more in the long run. Whether you encourage growth in the right ways or you fight it, it’s going to happen anyway.”
That’s what makes this sprawling, messy camp in the Jordanian desert such a compelling study in city-building — or as Kilian Kleinschmidt, the United Nations official in charge of Zaatari, calls it, “the most fascinating project on earth when it comes to the development of camps.”
Not that Zaatari is like downtown Amman. It is a squalid, barren, crime-ridden place. Most of those businesses and shops are unauthorized. Much of the site remains a tent city. But it’s a far cry from a camp like Azraq, which Jordan and the United Nations refugee agency opened to Syrians recently, or camps in Turkey, run by the Turkish government, that have state-of-the-art facilities but are designed to suppress the sort of ground-up urbanism that has altered Zaatari.
Azraq, located miles from anywhere, is strictly policed, with fixed, corrugated metal shelters in military order, dirt floors and shameful public toilets, and it has no electricity. So far about 11,000 Syrians are marooned there. The camp is planned to house more than 100,000.
Refugees at Azraq, families with small children, terrified at night without electricity to light the shelters, unprotected against the scorpions, mice and snakes, say they escaped one nightmare to arrive at another.
The oldest parts of Zaatari, by contrast, now have streets, one or two paved, some lined with electric poles, the most elaborate houses cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and shipping containers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and jerry-built sewers. Clusters of satellite dishes and water tanks on the skyline can bring to mind favelas in Rio de Janeiro or slums in Cairo. Like favelas, the camp has grown according to its own ad hoc, populist urban logic, which includes a degree of social mobility.
“What is happening at Zaatari, while causing lots of problems, also presents opportunities as the camp evolves into a complex ecosystem that you could call a city or a slum,” said Daniel Kerber of Morethanshelters, a German relief agency. “Either way, it’s a dynamic place, unforeseen by the humanitarian actors running it, which is giving refugees a sense of ownership and dignity.”
Mr. Kleinschmidt ticked off numbers: 14,000 households, 10,000 sewage pots and private toilets, 3,000 washing machines, 150 private gardens, 3,500 new businesses and shops. Not far from Mr. Bidawi’s barbershop, Zaatari has a pet store, a flower shop and a homemade ice cream business. Refugees tote rotisserie chickens from a takeout joint on the main street, called the Champs-Élysées.
This is all black market. Smugglers traffic in camp vouchers and goods, undermining legitimate Jordanian businesses, profiting criminal gangs in and out of the camp. An empty police station disappeared from near the camp entrance one night, its trailers repurposed as homes and shops two days later.
At a bridal shop here the other morning, the owner, Abdullah Harriri, said he had paid 7,000 Jordanian dinars, roughly $10,000, for his property at a prime location on the Champs-Élysées — another underground transaction. “By the end of the year I should be able to sell this property for 10,000 or 12,000” dinars, he calculated. A shadow real estate market is a sign of permanence.
Zaatari’s transformation happened after Mr. Kleinschmidt started talking with, and thereby neutralizing, the Mafia-like groups that had seized control of the camp. At the same time he worked to enlist allies among refugees, encouraging grass-roots initiatives, listening. In effect, he started treating Zaatari not like a camp but like a city. “We design refugee camps; refugees build cities,” he said.
Refugees at Zaatari steal the electricity that powers their shops and washing machines to the tune of $750,000 a month, an unsustainable burden for the United Nations. Mr. Kleinschmidt persuaded shop owners to install circuit breakers so the system would not collapse, and he is now working on a plan to institute monthly fees for shop owners and refugees with washing machines, eventually doing the same with sewage and water — in effect, slowly formalizing the camp’s economy, an approach both fair and politically savvy.
Jordan receives $1 million a day in international aid, and some Jordanians, including landlords, banks and small businesses, benefit from the Syrian influx. But poor Jordanians, who pay for their utilities, complain that Syrians steal jobs, drive up rents, overcrowd schools and drain resources.
Those complaints partly explain Azraq, which seems above all conceived to prevent Syrians from escaping or tapping into public utilities. If it grows as predicted, it will no doubt succumb anyway to the inevitable urbanizing forces that are changing Zaatari, which will be occupied for years to come, if not by Syrians than by Jordanians. Installing a permanent municipal water system there would cost what the United Nations now spends every year trucking water to the camp, and it would be an investment in long-term development.
Mr. Kleinschmidt, pushing this philosophy, is talking with, among others, representatives from Google about wiring the camp and with the urban planning office in Amsterdam, which recently offered 10,000 bicycles to the camp, an idea that prompted a few canny Syrian refugees to open bike repair shops even before the bikes arrived.
That sort of enterprise should serve the Jordanian economy. A sign that Jordanian officials may be coming around to this long-term thinking is a recent promise by the Ministry of Environment to deliver several thousand trees to the camp.
They would make life better for the Awad family, among the newest arrivals at Zaatari, nine of them, including six small children, sick from the flies and dysentery, crammed into windblown tents at the far end of the camp. Grateful to have left the bloodshed, they struggle to survive and dream about living like Rasheed Abdul Latif Rashed and his wife, Amal Zaubi, on the opposite end of Zaatari. That couple sold the family’s gold jewelry to buy a complex of trailers not far from the Champs-Élysées.
“We were used to living a decent life back home, so we had to make something of our situation here,” Mr. Abdul Latif explained, standing in the trailer that has become their living room, near a burbling aquarium and a martyr’s shrine to their only child, a son killed in Syria.
“You have to look ahead,” he said, as did Mr. Bidawi, the barbershop owner who lost a daughter.
*New York Times
AMMONNEWS - A young Syrian salesman stopped into Ahmad Bidawi’s barbershop for a shave the other day. Music wafted on fan-cooled air. Outside, on what has become the main commercial strip here in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, workers steered handcarts packed with lumber and kitchen appliances through sunbaked crowds hanging out in front of shops.
The scene could hardly have felt further from the mayhem across the border that Mr. Bidawi, like the other refugees, fled. Syria is only a few miles away. From the camp one can feel the shelling. A farmer back home and jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Bidawi arrived here with his wife and children a year ago, only to have his youngest daughter die in the camp, overwhelmed by tear gas fired when guards struggled to quell a riot. Everyone in Zaatari has horror stories about homes destroyed, family members lost and bad times in the camp.
But now, at a pace stunning to see, Zaatari is becoming an informal city: a sudden, do-it-yourself metropolis of roughly 85,000 with the emergence of neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp officials are scrambling to copy.
The change, accelerated by regional chaos and enterprising Syrians, illustrates a basic civilizing push toward urbanization that clearly happens even in desperate places — people leaving their stamp wherever they live, making spaces they occupy their own. At the same time, Zaatari’s evolution points more broadly to a whole new way of thinking about one of the most pressing crises on the planet.
In June, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number of refugees worldwide in 2013 topped 50 million, the most since World War II, a figure substantially increased by the Syrian conflict. Add to that one million Iraqis displaced during the first months of this year.
These vast forced migrations have accelerated discussions about the need to treat camps as more than transitional population centers, more than human holding pens with tents for transients. A number of forward-thinking aid workers and others are looking at refugee camps as potential urban incubators, places that can grow and develop and even benefit the host countries — places devised from the get-go to address those countries’ long-term needs — rather than become drags on those nations.
Such thinking is driven by reality: Syrian and Iraqi families, with no clear path to peace, and no other choice, their countries coming undone, find themselves facing extended exile in places like Zaatari, which the refugees are in effect retrofitting out of necessity to serve their immediate needs.
“You can call a place like Zaatari impermanent and not build adequate infrastructure,” as Don Weinreich, a partner at Ennead Architects in New York, recently put it. Ennead is collaborating with the United Nations refugee agency and Stanford University to reimagine how, and where, refugee camps around the world should, or shouldn’t, be planned and built.
“But organic development, driven by refugees, is unstoppable,” Mr. Weinreich said. “Impermanence costs more in the long run. Whether you encourage growth in the right ways or you fight it, it’s going to happen anyway.”
That’s what makes this sprawling, messy camp in the Jordanian desert such a compelling study in city-building — or as Kilian Kleinschmidt, the United Nations official in charge of Zaatari, calls it, “the most fascinating project on earth when it comes to the development of camps.”
Not that Zaatari is like downtown Amman. It is a squalid, barren, crime-ridden place. Most of those businesses and shops are unauthorized. Much of the site remains a tent city. But it’s a far cry from a camp like Azraq, which Jordan and the United Nations refugee agency opened to Syrians recently, or camps in Turkey, run by the Turkish government, that have state-of-the-art facilities but are designed to suppress the sort of ground-up urbanism that has altered Zaatari.
Azraq, located miles from anywhere, is strictly policed, with fixed, corrugated metal shelters in military order, dirt floors and shameful public toilets, and it has no electricity. So far about 11,000 Syrians are marooned there. The camp is planned to house more than 100,000.
Refugees at Azraq, families with small children, terrified at night without electricity to light the shelters, unprotected against the scorpions, mice and snakes, say they escaped one nightmare to arrive at another.
The oldest parts of Zaatari, by contrast, now have streets, one or two paved, some lined with electric poles, the most elaborate houses cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and shipping containers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and jerry-built sewers. Clusters of satellite dishes and water tanks on the skyline can bring to mind favelas in Rio de Janeiro or slums in Cairo. Like favelas, the camp has grown according to its own ad hoc, populist urban logic, which includes a degree of social mobility.
“What is happening at Zaatari, while causing lots of problems, also presents opportunities as the camp evolves into a complex ecosystem that you could call a city or a slum,” said Daniel Kerber of Morethanshelters, a German relief agency. “Either way, it’s a dynamic place, unforeseen by the humanitarian actors running it, which is giving refugees a sense of ownership and dignity.”
Mr. Kleinschmidt ticked off numbers: 14,000 households, 10,000 sewage pots and private toilets, 3,000 washing machines, 150 private gardens, 3,500 new businesses and shops. Not far from Mr. Bidawi’s barbershop, Zaatari has a pet store, a flower shop and a homemade ice cream business. Refugees tote rotisserie chickens from a takeout joint on the main street, called the Champs-Élysées.
This is all black market. Smugglers traffic in camp vouchers and goods, undermining legitimate Jordanian businesses, profiting criminal gangs in and out of the camp. An empty police station disappeared from near the camp entrance one night, its trailers repurposed as homes and shops two days later.
At a bridal shop here the other morning, the owner, Abdullah Harriri, said he had paid 7,000 Jordanian dinars, roughly $10,000, for his property at a prime location on the Champs-Élysées — another underground transaction. “By the end of the year I should be able to sell this property for 10,000 or 12,000” dinars, he calculated. A shadow real estate market is a sign of permanence.
Zaatari’s transformation happened after Mr. Kleinschmidt started talking with, and thereby neutralizing, the Mafia-like groups that had seized control of the camp. At the same time he worked to enlist allies among refugees, encouraging grass-roots initiatives, listening. In effect, he started treating Zaatari not like a camp but like a city. “We design refugee camps; refugees build cities,” he said.
Refugees at Zaatari steal the electricity that powers their shops and washing machines to the tune of $750,000 a month, an unsustainable burden for the United Nations. Mr. Kleinschmidt persuaded shop owners to install circuit breakers so the system would not collapse, and he is now working on a plan to institute monthly fees for shop owners and refugees with washing machines, eventually doing the same with sewage and water — in effect, slowly formalizing the camp’s economy, an approach both fair and politically savvy.
Jordan receives $1 million a day in international aid, and some Jordanians, including landlords, banks and small businesses, benefit from the Syrian influx. But poor Jordanians, who pay for their utilities, complain that Syrians steal jobs, drive up rents, overcrowd schools and drain resources.
Those complaints partly explain Azraq, which seems above all conceived to prevent Syrians from escaping or tapping into public utilities. If it grows as predicted, it will no doubt succumb anyway to the inevitable urbanizing forces that are changing Zaatari, which will be occupied for years to come, if not by Syrians than by Jordanians. Installing a permanent municipal water system there would cost what the United Nations now spends every year trucking water to the camp, and it would be an investment in long-term development.
Mr. Kleinschmidt, pushing this philosophy, is talking with, among others, representatives from Google about wiring the camp and with the urban planning office in Amsterdam, which recently offered 10,000 bicycles to the camp, an idea that prompted a few canny Syrian refugees to open bike repair shops even before the bikes arrived.
That sort of enterprise should serve the Jordanian economy. A sign that Jordanian officials may be coming around to this long-term thinking is a recent promise by the Ministry of Environment to deliver several thousand trees to the camp.
They would make life better for the Awad family, among the newest arrivals at Zaatari, nine of them, including six small children, sick from the flies and dysentery, crammed into windblown tents at the far end of the camp. Grateful to have left the bloodshed, they struggle to survive and dream about living like Rasheed Abdul Latif Rashed and his wife, Amal Zaubi, on the opposite end of Zaatari. That couple sold the family’s gold jewelry to buy a complex of trailers not far from the Champs-Élysées.
“We were used to living a decent life back home, so we had to make something of our situation here,” Mr. Abdul Latif explained, standing in the trailer that has become their living room, near a burbling aquarium and a martyr’s shrine to their only child, a son killed in Syria.
“You have to look ahead,” he said, as did Mr. Bidawi, the barbershop owner who lost a daughter.
*New York Times
AMMONNEWS - A young Syrian salesman stopped into Ahmad Bidawi’s barbershop for a shave the other day. Music wafted on fan-cooled air. Outside, on what has become the main commercial strip here in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, workers steered handcarts packed with lumber and kitchen appliances through sunbaked crowds hanging out in front of shops.
The scene could hardly have felt further from the mayhem across the border that Mr. Bidawi, like the other refugees, fled. Syria is only a few miles away. From the camp one can feel the shelling. A farmer back home and jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Bidawi arrived here with his wife and children a year ago, only to have his youngest daughter die in the camp, overwhelmed by tear gas fired when guards struggled to quell a riot. Everyone in Zaatari has horror stories about homes destroyed, family members lost and bad times in the camp.
But now, at a pace stunning to see, Zaatari is becoming an informal city: a sudden, do-it-yourself metropolis of roughly 85,000 with the emergence of neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp officials are scrambling to copy.
The change, accelerated by regional chaos and enterprising Syrians, illustrates a basic civilizing push toward urbanization that clearly happens even in desperate places — people leaving their stamp wherever they live, making spaces they occupy their own. At the same time, Zaatari’s evolution points more broadly to a whole new way of thinking about one of the most pressing crises on the planet.
In June, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number of refugees worldwide in 2013 topped 50 million, the most since World War II, a figure substantially increased by the Syrian conflict. Add to that one million Iraqis displaced during the first months of this year.
These vast forced migrations have accelerated discussions about the need to treat camps as more than transitional population centers, more than human holding pens with tents for transients. A number of forward-thinking aid workers and others are looking at refugee camps as potential urban incubators, places that can grow and develop and even benefit the host countries — places devised from the get-go to address those countries’ long-term needs — rather than become drags on those nations.
Such thinking is driven by reality: Syrian and Iraqi families, with no clear path to peace, and no other choice, their countries coming undone, find themselves facing extended exile in places like Zaatari, which the refugees are in effect retrofitting out of necessity to serve their immediate needs.
“You can call a place like Zaatari impermanent and not build adequate infrastructure,” as Don Weinreich, a partner at Ennead Architects in New York, recently put it. Ennead is collaborating with the United Nations refugee agency and Stanford University to reimagine how, and where, refugee camps around the world should, or shouldn’t, be planned and built.
“But organic development, driven by refugees, is unstoppable,” Mr. Weinreich said. “Impermanence costs more in the long run. Whether you encourage growth in the right ways or you fight it, it’s going to happen anyway.”
That’s what makes this sprawling, messy camp in the Jordanian desert such a compelling study in city-building — or as Kilian Kleinschmidt, the United Nations official in charge of Zaatari, calls it, “the most fascinating project on earth when it comes to the development of camps.”
Not that Zaatari is like downtown Amman. It is a squalid, barren, crime-ridden place. Most of those businesses and shops are unauthorized. Much of the site remains a tent city. But it’s a far cry from a camp like Azraq, which Jordan and the United Nations refugee agency opened to Syrians recently, or camps in Turkey, run by the Turkish government, that have state-of-the-art facilities but are designed to suppress the sort of ground-up urbanism that has altered Zaatari.
Azraq, located miles from anywhere, is strictly policed, with fixed, corrugated metal shelters in military order, dirt floors and shameful public toilets, and it has no electricity. So far about 11,000 Syrians are marooned there. The camp is planned to house more than 100,000.
Refugees at Azraq, families with small children, terrified at night without electricity to light the shelters, unprotected against the scorpions, mice and snakes, say they escaped one nightmare to arrive at another.
The oldest parts of Zaatari, by contrast, now have streets, one or two paved, some lined with electric poles, the most elaborate houses cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and shipping containers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and jerry-built sewers. Clusters of satellite dishes and water tanks on the skyline can bring to mind favelas in Rio de Janeiro or slums in Cairo. Like favelas, the camp has grown according to its own ad hoc, populist urban logic, which includes a degree of social mobility.
“What is happening at Zaatari, while causing lots of problems, also presents opportunities as the camp evolves into a complex ecosystem that you could call a city or a slum,” said Daniel Kerber of Morethanshelters, a German relief agency. “Either way, it’s a dynamic place, unforeseen by the humanitarian actors running it, which is giving refugees a sense of ownership and dignity.”
Mr. Kleinschmidt ticked off numbers: 14,000 households, 10,000 sewage pots and private toilets, 3,000 washing machines, 150 private gardens, 3,500 new businesses and shops. Not far from Mr. Bidawi’s barbershop, Zaatari has a pet store, a flower shop and a homemade ice cream business. Refugees tote rotisserie chickens from a takeout joint on the main street, called the Champs-Élysées.
This is all black market. Smugglers traffic in camp vouchers and goods, undermining legitimate Jordanian businesses, profiting criminal gangs in and out of the camp. An empty police station disappeared from near the camp entrance one night, its trailers repurposed as homes and shops two days later.
At a bridal shop here the other morning, the owner, Abdullah Harriri, said he had paid 7,000 Jordanian dinars, roughly $10,000, for his property at a prime location on the Champs-Élysées — another underground transaction. “By the end of the year I should be able to sell this property for 10,000 or 12,000” dinars, he calculated. A shadow real estate market is a sign of permanence.
Zaatari’s transformation happened after Mr. Kleinschmidt started talking with, and thereby neutralizing, the Mafia-like groups that had seized control of the camp. At the same time he worked to enlist allies among refugees, encouraging grass-roots initiatives, listening. In effect, he started treating Zaatari not like a camp but like a city. “We design refugee camps; refugees build cities,” he said.
Refugees at Zaatari steal the electricity that powers their shops and washing machines to the tune of $750,000 a month, an unsustainable burden for the United Nations. Mr. Kleinschmidt persuaded shop owners to install circuit breakers so the system would not collapse, and he is now working on a plan to institute monthly fees for shop owners and refugees with washing machines, eventually doing the same with sewage and water — in effect, slowly formalizing the camp’s economy, an approach both fair and politically savvy.
Jordan receives $1 million a day in international aid, and some Jordanians, including landlords, banks and small businesses, benefit from the Syrian influx. But poor Jordanians, who pay for their utilities, complain that Syrians steal jobs, drive up rents, overcrowd schools and drain resources.
Those complaints partly explain Azraq, which seems above all conceived to prevent Syrians from escaping or tapping into public utilities. If it grows as predicted, it will no doubt succumb anyway to the inevitable urbanizing forces that are changing Zaatari, which will be occupied for years to come, if not by Syrians than by Jordanians. Installing a permanent municipal water system there would cost what the United Nations now spends every year trucking water to the camp, and it would be an investment in long-term development.
Mr. Kleinschmidt, pushing this philosophy, is talking with, among others, representatives from Google about wiring the camp and with the urban planning office in Amsterdam, which recently offered 10,000 bicycles to the camp, an idea that prompted a few canny Syrian refugees to open bike repair shops even before the bikes arrived.
That sort of enterprise should serve the Jordanian economy. A sign that Jordanian officials may be coming around to this long-term thinking is a recent promise by the Ministry of Environment to deliver several thousand trees to the camp.
They would make life better for the Awad family, among the newest arrivals at Zaatari, nine of them, including six small children, sick from the flies and dysentery, crammed into windblown tents at the far end of the camp. Grateful to have left the bloodshed, they struggle to survive and dream about living like Rasheed Abdul Latif Rashed and his wife, Amal Zaubi, on the opposite end of Zaatari. That couple sold the family’s gold jewelry to buy a complex of trailers not far from the Champs-Élysées.
“We were used to living a decent life back home, so we had to make something of our situation here,” Mr. Abdul Latif explained, standing in the trailer that has become their living room, near a burbling aquarium and a martyr’s shrine to their only child, a son killed in Syria.
“You have to look ahead,” he said, as did Mr. Bidawi, the barbershop owner who lost a daughter.
*New York Times
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Refugee Camp for Syrians in Jordan Evolves as a Do-It-Yourself City
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