Though considered to be a temporary settlement, Zaatari Refugee Camp is 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 45 million people worldwide.
Right now, relief-oriented agencies focus on the immediate delivery of humanitarian goods; no one looks at the place as a city-in-the-making. We want policy makers and humanitarian agencies to see themselves as urban-planners-on-fast-forward, to reshape the agenda from immediate relief to accelerated renewal, and to create conditions where the new settlement that arises is acknowledged as an urban condition that can benefit from investment as well as charity.
This book would never have been completed without the help and support of GSD students Alison Ledwith and Joyce Lee, Associate Anya Brickman Raredon, and Analyst Molly McGowan. Special thanks is due to the generous individuals and organizations that gifted us their photographs, especially: Luke Vargas, Dalia Khamissy, Rachel Smalley, The REACH Initiative, CNES, Oxfam, NASA Earth Observatory, UNHCR, The Jordan Times, UNOSAT, and Stars and Stripes.
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