Structures of Protection?

Rethinking Refugee Shelter

Tom Scott-Smith, Mark E. Breeze, Tom Scott-Smith, Mark E. Breeze

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781800736306
  9781789207125
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789207132
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Questioning what shelter is and how we can define it, this volume brings together essays on different forms of refugee shelter, with a view to widening public understanding about the lives of forced migrants and developing theoretical understanding of this oft-neglected facet of the refugee experience. Drawing on a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, and history, each of the chapters describes a particular shelter and uses this to open up theoretical reflections on the relationship between architecture, place, politics, design and displacement.

Part I

Shelter, Containment and Mobility

Figure 1.1 Tempohomes in Berlin, Germany. © Mark E. Breeze, based on an image supplied by Hanna Baumann.

1

Moving, Containing, Displacing

The Shipping Container as Refugee Shelter

Hanna Baumann

Modified containers or ‘caravans’ have been used as temporary refugee housing in countless situations of mass displacement, whether due to forced migration or natural disaster. This is not surprising, given their relatively low cost and durability, as well as their ease of transport, setup, modification and eventual removal. In this chapter, I analyse the container shelter by examining its origins as a core infrastructure of global trade. The shipping container is mainly distinguished from other forms of prefabricated emergency shelter by its adherence to ISO standards. Its standardized size, stackability and corner fixtures allow for numerous possibilities of modular combination and enable seamless transport across air, sea and land. Due to its original use as an infrastructure of commercial exchange – indeed, one that reshaped the international economy – the shipping container used as refugee shelter also provides an occasion to investigate the links between global and urban regimes of (im)mobility.

I argue that shipping containers act as an infrastructure that facilitates the movement and redistribution of people across space using the example of container villages, the so-called ‘Tempohomes’ created in Berlin to accommodate large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers who have arrived in the city since 2015. I highlight the capacity of containers, on the one hand, to redistribute goods and wealth and, on the other, to contain and displace populations. As a form of shelter, containers are sturdy enough to form a first step in the process of settling people, but also flexible enough to move them elsewhere, or be removed entirely if no longer needed. This dual material quality of permanence and mobility makes container shelters an ideal technology for distributing and redistributing refugees and asylum seekers in response to fluctuating refugee policies.

The Shipping Container as an Infrastructure of Global Trade

The integration of the movement of goods across various surfaces and modes of transport – from freight ship to train to flatbed truck to plane – caused the so-called ‘intermodal’ container to revolutionize the shipping industry from the 1960s onwards. In integrating trade across the ‘transitional zone’ of the coast (Martin 2013), the standardized shipping container was able to minimize the time-consuming and costly process of loading and unloading ships, and thereby decrease the cost of maritime shipping substantially (Levinson 2006; Martin 2016). Not only did it increase the speed and rate at which goods moved across the globe, but the price of goods was no longer linked to the distance they had travelled, leading to what Harvey (1989) has called ‘time-space compression’. The shipping container thus became a ‘key innovation’ facilitating economic globalization (Harvey 2010).

The worldwide standardization of shipping containers by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) increased the scale of change by many magnitudes. Currently over 33 million ISO containers are in operation worldwide (World Shipping Council n.d.). The adoption of the so-called Twenty-Foot Equivalent Unit¹ as industry standard (in recent years replaced by the Forty-Foot Equivalent Unit) might be considered the real building block of the global ‘space of flows’ (Castells 1999). In mobility studies, ‘moorings’ are conceived of as the immobile infrastructures that enable flows (Hannam et al. 2006), but in the case of containers, the movement is facilitated by an element that is itself mobile. Furthermore, in addition to the steel cubes themselves, we might see the immaterial standard specifications applied to them as the infrastructure of globalization (cf. Bowker and Starr 1999; Easterling 2014). Containers thus function as both a ‘hard’ and a ‘soft’ infrastructure: they ‘mediate exchange over distance’ and thus form the ‘base on which to operate modern economic and social systems’ (Larkin 2013: 330) through their physical apparatuses as well as their adherence to a common set of norms and processes.

The shipping container not only spurred a massive increase in international trade, with world seaborne trade trebling between 1975 and 2015 to 1.75 billion metric tons (UNCTAD 2015); it also resulted in the redistribution of centres of commerce through the ascendancy of new economic powers such as Japan, and new port cities such as Busan, Korea (Levinson 2006: 271). Within cities too, it shifted the focal points of economic activity. Urban ports were severely affected by the rise of container shipping, and not only because longshoremen were no longer needed in the close-to-automatized processes of loading and unloading cargo. Due to the much higher volumes of goods moving through ports and the possibility of storing containers in situ, more space was needed than inner-city ports could offer. Many urban docksides and waterfronts thus declined as ports moved elsewhere (Martin 2016: 55ff). The container, then, both moves goods and redistributes the profits from those goods and movements, boosting some spaces by linking them to the international network of exchange, and causing the decline of others.

In addition, the shipping container is deeply embroiled with technologies of both war and humanitarianism. As Levinson (2006: 186ff) details, the Vietnam War marked a turning point for the expansion of global container-based trade. The U.S. military fully adopted this system for moving its cargo across the world, indirectly igniting Japan’s economic ascendancy, as it became profitable to fill empty containers on U.S. war ships in Japan as they returned from Vietnam on their way to California. Logistics has grown due to the just-in-time manufacturing and shipment flows that developed in the wake of containerization, but it is originally a military discipline that has become a core determinant of corporate success. Not only are corporate logistics based on martial precedents, but current supply chains relying on the orchestration of countless complex flows are highly securitized, and even defended with military might (Cowen 2014). At the same time, humanitarian logistics often use the same sites, paths, expertise and sometimes even personnel as their military counterparts (see Attewell 2018; Khalili 2018; Ziadah 2018) – with aid and reconstruction following in the footsteps of destruction, completing a circle of profit. Ticktin (2016) notes the dehumanization at work when people are forced to live in vessels made for commercial goods. When refugees are sheltered in shipping containers, their position in the context of these wider circulations is brought into sharp relief.

Berlin’s Tempohomes

In 2015, following the arrival of close to one million refugees in Germany, thousands of people were housed in emergency shelters that included office buildings, barracks, factories and gymnasiums. While 55,000 were housed in such shelters in Berlin at the peak of the so-called ‘crisis’, by mid 2018, only 900 individuals remained in these temporary situations (Abel 2018). In lieu of a permanent housing solution, shipping containers had been converted to residential units, called Tempohomes. These were intended to serve as shelters for an intermediate period of a maximum of three years – a short-term solution permitting the circumvention of regular planning laws.² The State of Berlin’s call for tender specified that shelters should be ‘20-foot standard containers’, corresponding to the ISO norm (State of Berlin 2016).

Berlin’s borough of Pankow explained the choice of container shelters as follows: ‘The mobile accommodations can be set up quickly, have a good standard, are relatively inexpensive and can be converted and used elsewhere if required’ (Stiftung SPI 2015). However, the agency in charge of Berlin’s refugee affairs also acknowledged that moving Berlin’s refugees into another temporary form of housing, after they had lived in emergency shelters, without privacy and often for years, was ‘not ideal’ and ‘provisional’. In an official communication, it explains that the ‘strain’ on the city’s housing market is to blame for the fact that only 3,500 refugees found accommodation in regular flats in 2017 (Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten 2017) – a number that decreased to just over 2,000 in 2018 (Berlin Senate 2019). Property prices in the city increased by twenty per cent in 2017 – the highest rate worldwide (Knight Frank 2018), leaving Berlin with a lack of affordable housing.

While the city’s initial plan was to erect thirty container villages made up of Tempohomes in order to house a total of 15,000 people, these targets were later lowered to seventeen sites with accommodation for 5,300 people, in part because fewer asylum seekers were arriving and in part because of the higher than anticipated cost of the shelters. The left-of-centre coalition that took over Berlin’s state government in late 2016 claimed that this downward correction reflected its policy priority of avoiding housing refugees in containers, but the previous right-of-centre coalition had in fact already reduced the scale of the plan because of the high number of asylum seekers in Berlin who were gaining refugee status (Berliner Zeitung 2016). The new plan provides for medium-term Modular Accommodation for Refugees (Modulare Unterkünfte für Flüchtlinge (MUFs)) to be built in fifty-three sites, suggesting that Tempohomes served mainly as an interim solution for those whose asylum claim had not been processed.

A typical Tempohome site consists of 244 containers arranged in single-storey configurations. Five hundred people are housed in sixty-four flats across eight accommodation buildings, with each flat made up of three containers. In addition, there are two buildings for communal activities and administration (twenty-four containers each) and one four-container unit for a ‘porter’ or security guard (Senatsverwaltung für Gesundheit und Soziales 2016). Externally, the appearance of the sites is often bare, with amenities such as greenery and playgrounds only added after refugees moved in. Internally, the flats, consisting of three containers, offer 45 m² of space for four to eight individuals – meaning 11.25 to 5.6 m² per person. This is still above the minimum standard in humanitarian response, specified as 3.5 m² per person (Sphere Project 2011), but well below the Berlin average of 40 m² (Der Spiegel 2015). More significantly, the ceiling height of just 2.2 m is quite low.

Each flat includes a small washroom with a shower, and a pantry kitchen including an oven/stove and refrigerator. While basic furniture items including beds, tables and cupboards are provided, sites do occasionally lack essential furniture. For instance, while 30 per cent of residents at the communal Tempohome accommodation at Finckensteinallee in Steglitz-Zehlendorf are infants and toddlers, no baby cots were included in the original setup, and the State Office for Refugee Affairs took some time to approve the additional items (German Red Cross 2018). Therefore, the visual impression related by residents of the surrounding neighbourhoods ranges from ‘sparse and functional’ (Berliner Kurier 2017a) to ‘dismal’ and ‘bleak’ (Berliner Kurier 2017b). While some Tempohome residents have expressed relief at the increased degree of privacy – as anything was perceived as better than living and sleeping in a gymnasium with hundreds of strangers – many others complained of the lack of privacy due to the density of accommodation and the lack of sound insulation and visual barriers between units (Vey 2018: 38–39). In addition, being fenced in, especially in an area used for leisure activities such as the former airfield of Tempelhof Airport, made one boy fear he would be stared at as if he were in a zoo (Frühauf n.d.).

Containment, (Re)Distribution and Displacement

As Katz (2015, 2017) notes, camps can be used for both ‘concentrating’ and ‘spreading’ populations, and this is true for container camps as well. The qualities of the shipping container can impact the spatial position of refugees in the city in both ways. On the one hand, when container villages are placed in low-density environments and sequestered off by physical obstacles and administrative barriers – albeit for security reasons – this serves to isolate and contain their residents. On the other hand, when they are linked to existing urban infrastructures, container shelters can serve as a first step to integrating refugee housing into the wider urban fabric. However, this kind of dispersal can also hinder integration. The provisional nature of the shelter makes the container an ideal technology to distribute (and redistribute) refugees across the city in line with changing administrative and policy requirements, undermining the development of local ties.

The outside of the shipping container, as a standardized form of packaging, rarely reveals the assemblages of items and materials inside (unless they spill out). To contain, then, is to shield something from public view, but also to stop it from permeating into that public. Most of the seventeen Tempohomes sites are outside central Berlin (with only a handful within, or near, the S-Bahn Ring around the urban core). This is in part because large empty plots are required to build the single-storey villages – approximately 12,000 m² for a standard site housing 500 people. A ‘double site’ accommodating 1,000 refugees, such as Elisabeth-Aue in Pankow, requires 26,000 m². This site takes up a small portion of a large field near an area of single-family homes and is visually separated from the main road and built-up area by a row of trees. Fences surround the perimeter of each site and, while residents may receive visitors, visits must be pre-announced and approved (Dalal et al. 2018). This security arrangement is explained as based on the need to protect refugee accommodation. In 2017, there were close to 2,000 attacks on refugees across Germany, resulting in 300 injuries, as well as over 300 attacks on refugee shelters (Der Spiegel 2018), twenty-six of which took place in Berlin (Pro Asyl 2017). Due to the securitization and the threat it reflects, it is perhaps not surprising that Tempohome residents complain of their isolation from their surroundings and, based on this, from German society at large (Vey 2018: 51). Even if the intention is to protect inhabitants from outsiders, the effect is also to contain refugees and minimize their interaction with the city around them.

Yet efforts have also been made to ensure the spatial integration of Tempohome residents in the city. Locations for Tempohomes were selected in a thorough process that was not only concerned with availability of space and technical feasibility; instead, links to social as well as ‘hard’ infrastructures were evaluated. For instance, the decision to build the Refugium Buch site in the Karow neighbourhood of the borough of Pankow, rather than using existing buildings, considered the proximity to schools, child daycare centres, shops and hospitals, in addition to transport links and the burden on water and electricity networks (Pankow Council 2015). Further, some of the Modular Accommodations for Refugees (MUFs) will be built in locations adjacent to the Tempohomes, suggesting that there is a longer-term plan for settling and spatially integrating residents. As politicians never fail to note, the MUFs, made from prefabricated concrete modules and with a lifespan of eighty years, can be added to the Berlin property market when they have outlived their purpose as refugee housing. In the MUFs, up to 500 people will be living in close quarters in one building (Abel 2018), at times in sparsely populated areas in which they will outnumber local residents (Berliner Morgenpost 2018), suggesting that the effect of concentration and containment will remain a challenge in the longer term.

A key factor in the decision for Berlin to invest some seventy-eight million Euros in Tempohomes (Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten n.d.) was the ease with which the containers could be moved to the desired locations. One supplier of containers for refugee shelter, a Dutch company called Tempohousing (2015), notes the versatile possibilities of delivering its shelters based on the twenty-foot shipping container: ‘by sea, road and train’. Highlighting the shipping origins of its containers, Tempohousing (2010) explains their advantages as hous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction. Places of Partial Protection: Refugee Shelter since 2015
• Part I. Shelter, Containment and Mobility
• Part II. Shelter, Resistance and Solidarity
• Part III. Architecture, Design and Displacement
• Conclusion. Towards Better Shelter: Rethinking Humanitarian Sheltering
• Index