Architecture and Refugee Camps: The Weekly Read

Cover of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Cover features an abstract painting composed of blues, greens, and purples. The composition is vaguely geometric, with black lines outlining different colors in triangular and rectangular shapes. One shape has handwritten, cursive writing in white within it that extends beyond the edge of the cover.

The Weekly Read is Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Focusing on the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border, the book shows how a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. Miriam Ticktin writes that, “This beautifully written and brilliantly original work elucidates a seemingly irresolvable tension, central to the condition of migrants, between the transience of the refugee category and how refugees’ lives are anchored in hard infrastructures and histories.” Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University, and coeditor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence. Read this fascinating book now for free!

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.