UC Berkeley

The image of the UN (United Nations) camp dominates the discourse, visual representations, and public imagination of refugees, especially Arab and Muslim refugees. Journalists, practitioners, and policymakers alike often claim that refugees and western humanitarianism have a coeval and coterminous history. This dissertation counters the presentist bias of these representations by situating the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis within an architectural and socio-legal history that spans from late Ottoman times to the present. Based on fourteen months of historical (archival and oral histories) and field-based (ethnographic and architectural documentation) research in Jordan, one of the world’s largest refugee host countries, it demonstrates how refugee shelter has taken a variety of forms, including Ottoman lands, self-built camps, and Islamic and Arab traditions of sanctuary. I excavate how and why refugees went from being granted Ottoman state-land in the late 19th century to being considered Jordanian nationals in legally contested Palestinian camps, and finally to becoming Syrian asylum seekers offered sanctuary in the abandoned houses of earlier refugees. Demonstrating how genealogies of Ottoman refugee aid, the poetics of Islamic and Arab traditions of migration and hospitality, and the everyday building activities of refugees help explain how over eighty percent of refugees in Jordan fulfill their housing needs outside of western humanitarian aid.This dissertation makes three major interventions that map onto its three core chapters. The first points to the inadequacy of conventional genealogies of refugee aid. Chapter 2 traces the shift from the Ottoman government’s allotment of state lands to Muslim muhajirs (refugees) to the emergence of two distinct patterns of refugee land tenure: de facto tenure, as exemplified by the case of legally contested Palestinian camps on lands that remain the legal property of the descendants of Ottoman refugees, and de jure tenures, as demonstrated by UN camps set-up for Palestinian and Syrian refugees. In returning to the centrality of the Ottoman empire for modern refugee responses, this part of my dissertation contributes to recent literature that has called for decentering the West from the story of refugee aid. The second intervention challenges the common assumption in urban and architecture studies that legally contested settlements are part of the so-called “informal” growth of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian cities. Chapter 3 analyzes how Palestinians resort to now-illegal Ottoman sale contracts (hujjas) to claim the space of the camp. Rather than assuming contested camps to be part of the informal growth of cities, this chapter illustrates how houses are inhabited and claimed as property through plural legal orders, in relationship to state law, not in isolation from it. The third intervention challenges the humanitarian category of “self-settled” refugees by revealing how the majority of contemporary Syrian refugees in Jordan fulfill housing needs through transnational networks of family and kin. Chapter 4 moves to the period after the 2011 war in Syria to examine the interrelationship between urban vacancy and the Islamic notion of Hijra (migration, abandonment) in the phenomenon of Syrian refugees’ abandonment of Syrian cities to find sanctuary in abandoned houses in Amman. Taken as a whole, this dissertation recovers the thread connecting late nineteenth-century Ottoman refugees, Palestinian survivors of 1948, and present-day Syrian refugees. Each chapter serves as a reminder of an episode in an evolving history of migration and the spatial and socio-legal remains of earlier migrations. I argue that amid cycles of colonization, invasion, and revolutions, refugee settlements in this region are at once a manifestation of historical crises and the remains of alternative architectural legacies of refugee sanctuary and multiethnic coexistence.