The Architecture of Emergency Shelters in the 2015 European Refugee Accommodation Crisis

The Architecture of Emergency Shelters in the 2015 European Refugee Accommodation Crisis investigates types of shelter and sheltering in Austria, France, Germany, and Greece, produced during 2015–2016. “European refugee crisis” is understood as a crisis in refugee accommodation, a contested context, where “emergency shelter” as a generic humanitarian project, though massively deployed, was also challenged in its shortcomings, intensely critiqued and subjected to experimental interventions. This chapter comprises a critical register of shelter cases that confronts the top-down large-scale “campization” solutions with bottom-up exceptions, documenting their architectural constitution, and highlighting designers’ proactive and creative engagement. Parallel to the enumeration of their architectural properties: metrics, spatial ordering, and materiality, shelters are discussed as processes of production, outcomes of the activation of multilayered social networks. The engagement of refugees with the process of shelter production, by constructing elemental domesticity and developing “agency” within encampment are significant criteria in the assessment of the cases, and further investigated as reformative factors in the production of new shelter paradigms, that challenge architecture’s instrumentality in redeeming the predicament of a “bare life.”