
Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning
The built environment as an added educator in East African refugee camps
Nerea Amorós Elorduy (Author)
Series: Design Research in Architecture
At the beginning of 2020, 66 long-term refugee camps existed along the East African Rift. Millions of young children have been born at the camps and have grown up there, yet it is unknown how their surrounding built environments affect their learning and development.
Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning presents an architect’s take on questions many academics and humanitarians ask. Is it relevant to look at camps through an urban lens and focus on their built environment? Which analytical benefits can architectural and design tools provide to refugee assistance and specifically to young children’s learning? And which advantages can assemblage thinking and situated knowledges bring about in analysing, understanding and transforming long-term refugee camps?
Responding to the extreme lack of information about East African camps, Nerea Amorós Elorduy has built contextualised knowledge – nuanced, situated and participatory – to describe, study and transform the East African long-term camps, and uncover hidden agencies in refugee assistance. She uses architecture as a means to create new knowledge collectively, include more local voices and speculate on how to improve the educational landscape for young children.
With this book, Amorós Elorduy brings nuance, contextualisation and empathy to the study and management of long-term refugee camps in East Africa. It is empathy, she argues, that will help change mindsets, decolonise humanitarian refugee assistance and its study. Crossing architecture, humanitarian aid and early career development, this book offers many practical learnings.
Praise for Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning ‘In Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning, Nerea Amorós questions the generic ‘modus ope-randi’ of the humanitarian system, and proposes that we see the refugee camps, and their built environment, as educative agents committed to the study detailed analysis of the fields as a vector to propose improvements and alternatives.’
ZARCH (Journal of Interdisciplinary studies in Architecture and Urbanism)
Foreword
Introduction The spatial and educational paradox of the long-term refugee camp Limited and biased knowledge Participation and decolonisation Study area and case studies Mapping and PAR Integrating theory, practice and research
Chapter 1 The urban turn: informality, co-modification and assemblage The nascence of the urban turn Informality Co-modification Assemblage thinking East African urban turn, a way forward?
Chapter 2 Ever-evolving assemblages: the built environment of seven East African long-term camps The beginning of refugee encampment policies in Eastern Africa The continuation of encampment and its effects on young children Complex, heterogeneous and ever-evolving encampment territories A multi-scalar spatio-temporal analysis Interactive and static characteristics of encampment assemblages Ever-changing, proto-urban learning assemblages
Chapter 3 Refugee-led: observed, imagined and tested spatial Interventions The power of place-making Extracting from urban theory Observed quiet encroachment and everyday life practices Refugee-imagined radical incrementalism Tested transversal spatial appropriations Conscious radical incrementalism
Conclusions Through the eyes of an architect Research by architectural design
Next steps
Key concepts
Acronyms
Bibliography
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800080119
Number of illustrations: 65
Publication date: 16 August 2021
PDF ISBN: 9781800080119
Read Online ISBN: 9781800080119
Paperback ISBN: 9781800080126
Nerea Amorós Elorduy (Author) 
Nerea Amorós Elorduy is Managing Director of Creative Assemblages Llc. and Guest Professor at UIC-Barcelona.
‘In Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning, Nerea Amorós questions the generic ‘modus ope-randi’ of the humanitarian system, and proposes that we see the refugee camps, and their built environment, as educative agents committed to the study detailed analysis of the fields as a vector to propose improvements and alternatives.’
ZARCH (Journal of Interdisciplinary studies in Architecture and Urbanism)
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