UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Refugee camps are designed as temporary emergency housing for people escaping conflict; however, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a refugee spends about 20 years in exile on average.
Dima Abu-Aridah, a native of Jordan and an architecture doctoral candidate in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, researched this very topic, culminating in her thesis titled “Who Designs the Camp? The Spatial Reproduction of Refugee Camps.” Abu-Aridah used strategies from spatial sciences, social sciences and cultural anthropology to examine how Syrian refugees in Jordan live in the Zaatari camp — a settlement for more than 80,000 Syrian refugees.
Abu-Aridah recently won the 2024 Alumni Association Dissertation Award for her research efforts and was recognized last year with the Graduate School’s Graduate Student International Research Award.
Abu-Aridah began researching refugee camps’ spatial and social economy from 2013 to 2016 when earning her master’s degree in spatial planning from German Jordanian University. As a doctoral candidate at Penn State, she furthered her research by studying the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan. She built her research based on interviews with 65 refugee households, observations and documentation of camp and shelter layouts.
“My research considers the residents and the refugee camps and examines how refugees recreate their social and spatial lives reforming their integrated physical home and social identity while in the camp,” Abu-Aridah said.
Organizations like the UNHCR manage refugee camps, and, in order to build the refugee camps, the agency follows a manual of standards.
According to the UNHCR camp planning standards, a camp needs at least 35 square meters of space per person to be deemed “acceptable” while 45 square meters per person is “standard.” As for covered living space, the residents have 3.5 square meters per person.
“They have an organization that manages their lives under that title of humanitarian planning, assistance and aid,” she said.
Abu-Aridah, who is a researcher in the Stuckeman School’s Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, found that these emergency standards create challenging conditions for refugees living there for years because of the camp’s temporary design.
“This is not how people live,” Abu-Aridah said. “Refugees are challenged to recreate their lives and rebuild what they lost in their homeland while living in this uncertain situation where they don’t know if they will be going back or what their future is. They live in transition, and there are a lot of challenges.”
Abu-Aridah’s study uses the term “reproduction” because the residents may be reproducing memories of spaces from the homes they had to leave. Her research involves two components: a spatial investigation of the structure of the camp and the social space of the camp, as well as how these two components relate to one another.
She observed that the refugees found living with people from different villages challenging.
“For them, it was a heterogeneous community which caused a lot of social rejection,” she said. “They told me that they did not come from the same village as their neighbors, so they had different backgrounds. They couldn’t cope with this kind of mixing. This is a social perception of what’s going on. They demonstrated a strong desire to stay indoors and isolate themselves from the community.”
She said she hopes that her research will inform and benefit the agencies involved in planning refugee camps by helping them make adjustments to the emergency response manuals and design guidelines and also contribute to developing a socio-spatial design tool that can facilitate the creation of transitional settlements. Her study advocates for transitional housing as critical infrastructure aligned with refugees' social, cultural and physical requirements.
“Just giving those insights on the social and spatial dynamics of what’s going on could inform decision-makers and humanitarian agencies on how to better plan for refugees and consider the long-term existence of refugee camps,” Abu-Aridah said.