Architecture of Migration is an erudite tome that offers a fresh analysis of a place that has been the subject of scholarship on forced migration and humanitarianism for years: the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. Methodologically innovative and unorthodox, however, this new book attempts to defamiliarise readers with the camp, its residents and well-worn scholarly discourses through more transversal readings of history, materiality and modernity. Intervening in debates on architecture, domesticity and the spatiality of camps, the book steers away from reducing Dadaab to a carceral space, and refugees to victims of dispossession but reinterprets their lifeworlds as an ‘architecture of migration’ that comprises infrastructures, intimacies, socio-materialities – even the earth beneath their feet. In this ambitious and visually captivating work, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi recentres refugees as ‘architects’ of a humanitarian ecology who, through creative designs and affective labour, persist in the face of contradictory pressures to be simultaneously settled but remain transient. Rather than an endpoint of spectacular precarity as depicted in the media, Siddiqi rightfully treats Dadaab as ‘a profound site of theory’.
The book consists of an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion. What immediately strikes the reader are the beautiful colour illustrations that make the volume visually engaging and aesthetically unique. In the introduction, Siddiqi retheorises the camp not as an object but ‘one prolonged event in a history, marked through architecture’. She argues for viewing Dadaab not as a forgotten place of exception but as a flashpoint of architectural modernity where refugees are actively making and remaking their built environment and social relations. Chapter 1 thinks of the camp as the latest iteration in a long line of foundational partitions of territory, resources and the ‘self’ that make encampment possible. Chapter 2 then turns to the ways in which sedentarisation and enclosures have long worked as colonial technologies to reign in a ‘non-proprietary commons’ of mobile or nomadic people through coercive means which still have resonance in Dadaab today. Chapter 3 counters familiar carceral histories with a critical reading of inhabitation not shaped by the staleness of ‘shelter’ but by domesticities that reproduce life, kinship and intimacy among refugees. Chapter 4 is dedicated to unearthing the scattered archives in which Dadaab's history is preserved and which challenge the presentism enshrined in what Siddiqi calls the ‘emergency territory’ carved out by humanitarians. Finally, chapter 5 explores in detail the materialities of the camp through bespoke designs that have transcended their specific use value and become signifiers of humanitarian knowledge in their own right within the aid world. The Afterword concludes that an architecture of migration is not just about physical structures that anchor refugee lives in exile but is, indeed, a poetics that channels defiant forms of homemaking.
Overall, the book's ambitious, undisciplined and creative assemblage is refreshing to read and cuts deep into the theoretical possibilities that arise from mobilising a wild patchwork of sources, timelines and histories. Its arrangement of texts, images, drawings, reports and first-hand narratives make it a worthwhile addition to the already compendious literature on Dadaab and camps more broadly. However, the book's strength is also its primary weakness. By trying hard to weave together disparate strands of analysis, the book treads a fine line between academic poeticism and diluting its theoretical contribution. Throughout, readers are often left to piece together what the ‘architecture of migration’ may be, as Siddiqi widens and contracts its definition at will. Where the book is arguably strongest, however, is in its treatment of ‘insurgent domesticities’ that offer an original lens through which to examine the myriad counter-conducts that blossom in, and in spite of, the camp. Novel are also Siddiqi's reflections on the materialities of encampment, especially the makuti and tuqul, that help us reconsider questions of inhabitation, land, labour and ethnic belonging. While the book demonstrates the author's studious reading of literatures from architecture, the arts and anthropology, it lacks a serious engagement with the most influential body of work on camps: human geography. Here the book's concerns around territorial partitions, space-making, abolition and the tensions between ‘institutional’ aid and ‘makeshift’ living have already been hotly debated and could have nicely framed Siddiqi's novel contributions.
Despite the above points, the book is teeming with creative energy and represents an utterly original intervention indispensable for anyone with an interest in camp studies. It issues a warning against conceptual complacency and shows the benefits of revisiting overly familiar sites with fresh eyes. By putting forward the notion of an ‘architecture of migration’, the book aims to liberate the camp from its theoretical cage of emergency, dispossession and coercion to foreground the ways in which it carries on older forms of mobile knowledge and praxis into contemporary landscapes of aid. Weaving together the vestiges of architectural modernity, nomadic histories, geology and political ecologies, Siddiqi's book rings with poetic insights that are both compelling and beautiful.
