The metaphor of “fragment” provides a good entry point into the last book of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre’s director Tom Scott-Smith. A poignant exergue from John Berger welcomes the reader in—“without a home everything is fragmentation.” If this is the existential condition of asylum seekers, then emergency shelters to house them are like fragments of home. Could they be more than that, though?

Drawing on multisited fieldwork, and on an impressively rich interdisciplinary scholarship, Scott-Smith invites us to an original and insightful travel across shelter configurations. The book successfully challenges the societal invisibility to which the temporary inhabitants of humanitarian protection seem to be fated. At the same time, it subtly defies the mainstream use of all-encompassing categories about “camps,” ranging from spaces of exception and hypersurveillance to total institutions, regardless of variations in circumstances and in lived experience. For sure, there is nothing romantic or inherently desirable in asylum infrastructures. However, their inner ways of sociability, mutual support, and incipient urbanism are as real as the pervasive forms of violence, state-led or otherwise, which have pushed people there. Having this in mind, there is much to learn about humanitarianism and its inherent contradictions from the beautiful and thick descriptions of this book, in a tone that manages to stay lively and engaging while recounting about sites, buildings, and lives that have little of that.

The author deftly guides the readers across disparate forms and sites of refugee sheltering, each of them falling under a distinct category. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the tour starts from Calais’ Jungle, a weirdly hypermediatized site and a demonstration of refugees’ struggle to adapt unhomely spaces and weave informal networks inside them, in interaction with humanitarian agents and sympathetic activists. The case of Calais already foregrounds a key analytical aim of the book—unveiling and situating the tension between institutional accommodation and informal, community-driven inhabitation. Following that, Fragments of home unfolds as a collection of case studies that are remarkably diverse in location, scale, visibility, purpose of sheltering, and ethnographic depth. The list includes refugee housing in entire countries (Syrians in Lebanon under the governmental “no-camp policy”), “traditional” large-scale camps (Azraq and Za’atari in Jordan), urban infrastructures for refugee accommodation, both top-down and bottom up (in Athens, Berlin, Vienna and Paris), and even a specific, if widespread sheltering infrastructure (IKEA’s so-called better shelter).

The categories used for each configuration, from the “basics” and “metrics” of shelter to its “pragmatics” and “tactics,” up to “politics,” “poetics,” and “aesthetics,” are not inscribed in specific sites only. They are not mutually exclusive, nor do they all have the same societal or analytical significance. Nonetheless, they do a good job in connecting local findings with larger scholarly and professional debates. Across concepts and chapters, the author wonders if there is anything like a universal shelter, whereby “human needs could be standardized and controlled” (p. 6). Could we ever think of a shelter model that would be adequate and sustainable anywhere, regardless of environmental, political and cultural variation? The author’s negative answer should not come as a surprise for social scientists. The same holds for his counter-argument: if anything universal exists, this is rather the need for a protected place of one’s own, with a degree of privacy and control. How far shelters live up to this standard is, of course, a context-dependent question. Different case studies offer different answers to it. There are, however, major questions about autonomy, temporality, and inhabitation that do not seem to encounter a fully satisfactory answer in the book. In these respects, the author’s elegant and thoughtful descriptions tend to stay unnecessarily confined to humanitarian planning and design, rather than facilitating conversation with refugee, housing, or social protection studies.

Against the ambition of standardized and decontextualized sheltering, Fragments of home argues for “autonomy” as “a key principle of design… that allows refugees to decide what to prioritize” (p. 153). However, while autonomy means different things to different disciplines and researchers, most of these would concur in seeing it as irreducible to sheltering. Important as shelter is, can it suffice to “prevent human suffering” (p. 11)? Wouldn’t this rather involve the cessation of the violence people fled, or at least their access to social and legal protection, inclusive social networks, welfare infrastructures, and the labor market? Even the best-designed shelter does little to “allow its inhabitants to shape their life and determine its course” (p. 156), unless it is inscribed in larger processes of social recognition and inclusion. Shelters, writes Scott-Smith, “should help fulfil one’s ideals of a better life” (13). Is there, though, any better life ideal that can be reconciled with living in a shelter? Perhaps this transformative aim should fall in the remit of long-term, mainstream housing, as long as this becomes accessible. The next steps for researching shelters has then to do with their connectedness, or lack thereof, with ordinary infrastructures. This calls for exploring the housing pathways they alternatively prepare, hinder, or replace across contexts of (post)war, systemic crisis, or displacement.

What housing options are available after shelter, if any, is a question that would have deserved a separate chapter (suggested title: Shelter as temporality). If refugee shelter is to be a “process, not a product” (pp. 33–34), we are still left wondering where the process can or should lead us, and why. Whereas a static view of shelter means reproducing separate and dedicated accommodation, a transitionary logic should entail access to less dedicated, marginalized and segregated housing—not just to “better shelters.” Despite the increase in protracted displacement arrangements worldwide, shelters are temporary by design. They may leave significant traces in the memories of their inhabitants, but they still only amount to one step in their trajectories. We could then wonder how autonomous shelter is as a subject of research—except for planners and designers themselves—or of experience. The author already gives us an answer from the outset: “emergency shelters consider just one fragment of a much bigger picture” (p. 17). However, it is not entirely clear why so much of that picture stays out of the book. This leaves us with the need for deeper conversation between architects and other professionals (including researchers), decision makers, and activists who share a concern for refugee rights to be met, and for their marginalization to be over. This, of course, is not meant to dismiss the role of shelters, which do not “have to be minimal because they are temporary” (p. 130). Greater investment in their infrastructural quality and accessibility can only be welcome. Less welcome is the idea that looking at shelter is enough to make sense of refugee conditions and trajectories, and to devise sustainable strategies to improve them. No doubt, such a “shelter reductionism” is far from the spirit of the book. Nevertheless, the view of shelter as an isolated and a self-standing subject, with an invariable script of emergency and segregation, is tempting for humanitarians. It also risks becoming the new normal for the ordinary public. If there is a division of labor (or maybe a turf war) whereby shelter is the preserve of humanitarians, this should still encourage attention to all that comes after an emergency; unless, of course, we accept chronic crisis and protracted displacement as the permanent norm. Here, a seasoned or cynical observer might easily rejoin that this is the norm in a number of locations across the global south. Wherever no prospect of life improvement is in sight, the logic of harm reduction would recommend improving shelters at least. However, I doubt that this argument would apply to the European contexts described by Scott-Smith, unless we resign to pervasive campization as the way forward, in times of unprecedented bordering against displaced people.

One last question that may raise the eyebrows of some readers is the analytical choice to privilege the built environment over its lived experience. In fact, Scott-Smith also draws on selected refugee narratives and makes a compelling case for stronger user involvement in shelter design and management. Overall, though, his concern for infrastructures, including their histories of ruination and their ingrained symbolic meanings, takes far more space than the personal and collective stories of their inhabitants. Again, this need not be an issue for a readership of planners or designers. It is less welcome, though, for fieldworkers, social workers, and refugee supporters, all of them having much to learn from this book otherwise. The priority given to place over people as place-makers has two undesirable implications. First, it does not cast sufficient light on the huge diversity that lies behind generic categories such as inhabitants, migrants or refugees, the latter being especially contentious and consequential. Furthermore, it does not facilitate in-depth exploration of the ways of being and the social worlds of residents themselves. As much ethnographic fieldwork suggests, these may combine minor forms of home-making with substantive dismissal of the place they are in – a “non-home” that deserves no positive emotion or attachment, cramped, temporary and heteronomous as it is. If place-making was privileged over place as such, we would gain more analytical space to understand, and hopefully contribute to shape, what happens in the larger social, economic and political environment. Which means, to conclude, that the fragment metaphor is relevant indeed. Shelter is a fragment, even in a narrowly analytical sense. It needs to be understood as a part of the societal structures and processes it belongs to, for us to fully apprehend both its significance and limitations.