The Instant City
Shifting the paradigm of intervention in post-disaster communities so that humanitarian and relief organizations approach their work as investment in city-building for uprooted populations, rather than furthering the aid dependency of traditional refugee camps
Zaatari Refugee Camp, located in northwest Jordan near the Syrian border, opened in 2012 to host Syrians fleeing the civil war. In 2014, AHI published Zaatari: The Instant City to document what Zaatari is and what it is becoming, and to put forward the concept of "instant cities” within humanitarian resettlement and reconstruction discourse. Though considered to be a temporary settlement, in 2014 Zaatari was one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in Jordan, housing more than 120,000 Syrian refugees on a 2-square-mile plot of desert and costing $500,000 a day to run. Instant cities like Zaatari are not acknowledged as such, even though they last an average of 17 years and currently house 4.5 million people worldwide.
AHI’s subsequent Instant Cities research program intended to shift the paradigm of intervention in post-disaster communities so that humanitarian and relief organizations approach their work as investment in city-building for uprooted populations, rather than furthering the aid dependency of traditional refugee camps. The increased scale of human displacement, combined with the increasing persistence of long-term humanitarian settlements, necessitates a shift in approach from seeing these settlements as temporary camps to understanding them as a new urban form, the Instant City.
In 2015, more than 8 million Syrians were internally displaced; another 1.6 million were in Turkey, and more than 2.4 million were scattered across Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East – 12 million people displaced by one conflict. In Dadaab, one of the biggest refugee camps in the world in northeastern Kenya, over 300,000 Somali refugees live inside the gates, while over 30,000 live in informal shelters just outside. The world’s current shelter and settlement strategies – standardized, homogenous, and emphasizing immediate externally provided goods rather than enabling refugee-led development – are failing the challenge.
Far from being helpless, the modern displaced person is often well educated, highly skilled, and motivated to improve their environment given even the simplest of foundational support. Therefore, the creation of humanitarian settlements that are intended to function as cities, with the infrastructure, economics, and social conditions that are inherent to a dense and relatively permanent settlement, will allow residents to build equity and regain a sense of normalcy. Approaching the establishment of humanitarian settlements in this way will provide opportunities to leverage the resources and assets of the displaced – financial, material, and intellectual – to create a better quality of life during displacement, stronger communities, and more sustainable solutions.
Today’s refugee is tomorrow’s citizen. As planners, architects, and humanitarians we must work to create the conditions for the growth of Instant Cities rather than instant slums.
We presented our research on instant cities and humanitarian settlements as a new urban form at several conferences between 2014 and 2016, including the Low/NoCost Housing Conference in Zurich, the 2014 InterAction Forum, and the World Bank’s 6th Global Housing Finance Conference.