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of people away from their homes, because TRUCKS, FOUR-WHEELment DRIVE VEHICLES, people naturally flee into protected zones WALKIE-TALKIES, SATELLITE PHONES AND seeking refuge and care. Aggressors have also learnt how to use the presence of aid organizaCOMPUTERS CREATE ARTIFICIAL tionsAN and humanitarian zones to induce population transfer from areas they wish to ethnically ENVIRONMENT, WHOSEcleanse. PERVERSE EFFECT Aid could thus affect the development of hostilities and whether a conflict worsens or IS TO PUT THE TEAMS IN QUASI-VIRTUAL abets.A In many conflicts, aid might have actually worsened the situation on the ground. WORLD WHERE TIME AND SPACE ARE In his pioneering research on refugee camps in Africa, architect Manuel Herz demonMEASURED IN DIFFERENT UNITS FROM strated the amazingly rapid process by which anonymous rows of prefabricated dwellings THOSE OF THE COUNTRY WHERE THEY FIND evolve into sites of urban complexity. Within of relocation, barter and commerce are THEMSELVES. SO THEYdays FIND THEMSELVES, established. Within weeks, markets evolve to exchange goods labor the citizens of ALMOST WITHOUT KNOWING IT,and IN Awith BUBBLE, the host country. Within several months, clusters and districts turn into a “neighborhood,” and A “NON-PLACE,” A HUMANITARIAN MISSION temporary shelters become solid structures of | 79 adobe, brick or corrugated sheets. Camps are WHICH COULD BE EVERYWHERE AND always “less” than cities, but have a sense of the urban nevertheless. WHICH IS NOWHERE…
zones—such as those recently established in the DRC after the resumption of hostilities there— quickly give rise to refugee camps, the latter forming the material link between the concept of “humanitarian intervention” and a massive and rapid, although largely unnoticed, processes of migration, construction and urbanization. Humanitarian zones are global spaces—woven into international networks of information-flow through the media and to the global network of commodity-circulation through the products of aid. At present, the 13,000 international aid workers in Darfur (citizens of more than thirty different nations, members of hundreds of different relief organizations) are living in scores of staff encampments built next to refugee camps. Rony Brauman described this growing archipelago of aid workers camps in these words: * Paradoxically, the establishment of these zones during war might accelerate the move-
So while the emergency architecture of humanitarian relief often seeks to communicate temporariness, because camp residents often like to demonstrate their intention to return to the places from which they were forcefully relocated, these places may linger for decades in a state similar to what Georges Orwell once called the “endless present”—permanent temporariness without past or future. Herz also demonstrated how the internal layout of many camps