Presentation by Anya Brickman Raredon from the Affordable Housing Institute, MCP 2011. She discussed AHI's 2015 INSTANT CITIES research, looking at how refugee camps persist for extended periods and should be designed accordingly. Zaatari, a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan will be used as an illustrative example.

Zaatari is 530-hectare Refugee Camp with a population of approximately 200,000 developed by the UNHCR and the Mafraq Governorate of Jordan in 2012.  It had received an estimated 3,000 – 4,000 refugees per night through mid-2013. The Instant Cities Research intends to shift the paradigm of intervention in post-disaster communities to be an investment in city building for uprooted populations. The presentation was part of the class examining the refugee crisis, structured around the four stages of the refugee trajectory in Europe.  The course builds on the earlier work for the UNHCR reviewing the refugee camps around the world, including Somalia, Sudan, Philippines, and Mexico, which lead to a draft procedural handbook proposal for camp and settlement planning.

The full report, ZAATARI: THE INSTANT CITY, 2014, Affordable Housing Institute can be downloaded here: Click here