Green Case Study: Refugee Camps as sustainable urban initiatives
Refugee camps have long been based on temporary unsustainable and unplanned habitats that aim to shelter rather than to provide security and resilience for displaced communities and asylum seekers. The refugee camp was never the ideal utopia of a ‘safe haven’ but rather a short-term living environment that has long been associated with social stigmas of living in displacement, lack of safety and security and a classifiable lack of governance and internal policies on the sustainability of these living environs.
This all feeds into the obvious lack of sustainable visions by policy makers and municipalities as they financially provision for refugee camps’ incontrollable growth but not sustainable and efficient urban infrastructures.
The aim of reimagining refugee camps is not to greedily capitalise on unfortunate living situations and at-heart not to profit from a misfortune, rather to reflect the humanitarian values embedded within sustainability as an ideal paradigm and implement that narrative within a landscape in need.
As UNHCR puts it, “The best way to achieve sustainable energy for refugees is to make them partners and not just recipients”.
As Professor Kes Mccormick stated in lecture ‘Sustainable Urban Transformation’, part of Lund University's "Sustainable Economies" course, the three keys aspects that define urban transformations are: governance and planning, innovation and business and lifestyle and consumption. Transforming refugee camps from landscapes of fear and isolation to potential sustainable and resilient environments can yield incredible changes to the economy and the humanitarian community.
There is nothing more pleasing to my imagination as a sustainability professional and architect than to envisage communal architecture rather than unsustainable building conditions shaping these temporary habitats where public open space is shared, access to health and sanitary amenities is provided and an urban infrastructure embedded. A great urban transformative action that follows these basic prerequisites for a sustainable habitation is Greening Bourj Al Shamali in South Lebanon.
The initiative aims to green and improve the living conditions of Bourj Al Shamali refugee camp which has been initially defined as urban, economic and environmental problem in a country that has seen much turmoil from economic to social and environmental disasters.
Founded after 1948, it has now taken the classification as a permanent city; overcrowded, unplanned, and ungoverned. Receiving the attention of the wider local community, concerned with the poor environmental conditions within the camp, Bourj Al Shamali refugee camp has become the top of their priorities. A policy action plan has been established by the local community committee capitalising on the sustainable use of the land, i.e. agricultural initiative, creating a map for the camp, a citizen science club and a community garden. (Source: http://bourjalshamali.org/)
Greening Bourj Al Shamali is in my opinion one of the modest urban transformative experiments in the Middle East context but one that truly reflects the core definition of sustainability vision. I am reminded by Lara Hale’s lecture on building standards in the built environment where she stated that if sustainability is not accessible to the community in need it should not be referred to as sustainability; it becomes a luxury. Bourj Al Shamali worked on integrating the local and wider community within the camp and surrounding urban context to create a positive water smart, waste smart and energy smart living environment that follows the bottom-up approach to problem solving rather than a one size fits all approach.
Moustafavi argued in Ecological Urbanism on sustainable design that the moral imperative of sustainable design tends to supersede disciplinary contribution and by such sustainable design is not always perceived as an implementation of design excellence or design innovation. Bourj Al Shamali has perhaps not succeeded in creating fine architecture with the ideal solar panel on the roof and water tank in the backyard kind of scenario and there is no use of any material besides concrete that structure these buildings, but what it proves is that a refugee camp can instil sustainable governance for urban transformation that works towards the future of the transitory habitat.
So where does Bourj Al Shamali go from here?
While we have looked at the local community’s effort to promote a healthier and more sustainable green initiative by establishing a pilot project on urban agriculture, contributing to urban food security and instilling the concept of shared communal work, Bourj Al Shamali has implemented on a sustainable urban action. The project will target twenty women-headed and/or vulnerable households in the camp as “as they often spend large amounts of time at home and are therefore ideally positioned to take care of a rooftop garden”. By simply taking one step further into seasonal local and organic produce market to the wider public domain a stronger and greener economy would surface and feed into the camp, by introducing educational sessions on water smart methods for agriculture and household use, implementing water meter and energy meters, the municipality of South Lebanon would benefit as well as the partners, not recipients.
Source of images:
http://bourjalshamali.org/
