Who is Doing What? Spatial Practices in Refugee Camps – Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Looking beyond the camp plan

In this paper, we asked who is actually shaping refugee camps when they remain in place far longer than anyone first expected. We studied Syrian-Kurdish refugee camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where displacement after the Syrian conflict has turned temporary shelter into the setting for daily life, family routines, hopes and difficult decisions about belonging.

We did not want to describe the camps only through the actions of governments and humanitarian organisations. Those formal actors plan, provide, regulate and maintain much of the built environment, but residents are constantly working with and around what is provided. Through field visits, interviews with households and staff, and historical research, we looked at how standardised units are extended, adapted and inhabited so that they can support a life people recognise as their own.

How a shelter becomes a home

The changes we encountered were often ordinary and deeply meaningful. Families enlarged kitchens, adapted rooms to receive guests, marked thresholds, grew plants and used the spaces between dwellings for cooking, meeting and hosting. A door that closes, a porch, a window or a planted entrance can express safety, privacy, dignity and hospitality. These are not superficial alterations. They show how residents create familiarity and social life within conditions they did not choose.

We use the ideas of everyday ‘home’, remembered or symbolic ‘Home’, and ‘HOME’ as a wider relationship with homeland and identity to understand this process. In the Kurdish context, shared language, culture and political history also shape how Syrian Kurds experience refuge in Iraq. Camp spaces can refer at once to Syria, Kurdish belonging and an uncertain present. The result is a hybrid spatial reality, made and remade through daily practice.

Our intention is not to romanticise camp life or overlook the constraints of humanitarian governance, poverty and unresolved futures. Rather, we argue that camp improvement has to acknowledge residents as active spatial agents. Better planning needs to support dignity and safety while leaving room for the adaptations through which people rebuild community. A camp may start as emergency infrastructure, but over time it becomes a contested and meaningful place of home-making.