ABSTRACT
This text speaks of domesticity. It approaches the historical and historiographical problem of housing from the spatial and temporal rubric of emergency. In it, the housing question is a problem performing dialectically within the constancy of political and environmental catastrophe and its reproduction of crisis. As emergency calls for interventions beyond local mutual aid, involving designated international agencies and systems of relief, it occasions architectures of shelter and uses of land, which rush Engels’ question into an urgent domesticity in the present. The episode at the center of this text took place in Ifo refugee camp at Dadaab, Kenya, established near the border of Somalia after the breakdown of its government and civil structures in 1991. The work of one homemaker in relation to a history of development practices brings into sharp relief the differences between shelter and housing, between the humanitarian and social projects. Just as the politics of emergency construct the emergency subject, shelter’s visual rhetoric of ephemerality belies the housing question at its core. In the episode here, shelter casts ephemeral architectures as rooted and structural. It produces humanitarian homemakers—emergency subjects—as architects.
