I thank Paolo Boccagni for his thoughtful review. It is clear we share many interests—not least an engagement with ethnographic methods, an attention to life within institutional asylum centers, and a desire for more complex accounts than those offered by the familiar literature on camps as spaces of exception. I read his review with great appreciation, though at times it felt as though he were responding less to the book I wrote than to the one he wished I had written. His call for greater detail on place making and the lived experience of shelter inhabitants is understandable, given his own illuminating work in this field. But that was not the book I set out to write. My focus lay instead on the humanitarian imagination: on how the notion of meeting a “basic human need” for shelter is conceived and enacted in practice. In other words, my concern was not primarily with how shelters are experienced, but with how and why they are designed and conceptualized as they are.

There are, I think, the seeds of a productive disagreement here. Boccagni questions the value of treating “shelter as an isolated and self-standing subject.” I clearly see the value—having written a book about it— and was particularly interested in how this subject was conceived by my humanitarian interlocutors. He describes the book as “unnecessarily confined to humanitarian planning and design.” This is a bit like my suggesting that his own work is “unnecessarily confined to the description of everyday life in a single building.” We all begin with boundaries, and it is precisely such limits that give our studies their coherence. Without them, we risk expanding so far that our research becomes about everything—and therefore, perhaps, about nothing. His fascinating book opens up nothingness to let everything flow in. That is its power, but also its potential flaw—though his focus on a single building keeps the work contained.

I would also like to clarify a few further points. Boccagni suggests that I believe shelter can “prevent human suffering,” but my argument was quite the opposite: that, however broadly defined, shelter can never achieve all that humanitarians hope for. He also attributes to me the idea that “shelters should help fulfil one’s ideals of a better life,” but again I was describing others’ views, not my own. (The full sentence reads, “many writers have also suggested that shelters should help fulfil one’s ideals of a better life.”) In both cases, my aim was to trace how others have invested their hopes in the idea of shelter, not to endorse their assumptions. I certainly do not think autonomy is reducible to shelter; rather, I suggest that autonomy can serve as a principle to improve shelter, given the constraints of the humanitarian system.

Let me close by turning to Boccagni’s concluding point—that “shelter needs to be understood as part of the societal structures and processes it belongs to.” On this I fully agree. Yet, any such understanding must also include the worldviews of those designing, funding, and managing shelters. There is as strong a case for focusing at this level—“studying up,” by taking the imaginaries of humanitarians, architects, and local authorities—as there is for examining the experiences of those who live with their decisions. We surely need books about both. This is why I am pleased to have taken part in this exchange: because our books illuminate two sides of a broader issue. My book focuses on those who design asylum accommodation; his, on those who live within it. Above all, there is something we share: a deep critique of the paternalism at the heart of such systems.