Place Attachment in Refugee Camps: Ideology, Pragmatism and Patogeneous Attachment

Anna Catharina Hansson (Arkitektgarden)

Palestinian refugee camps pose important questions about place attachment. Refugee camps are generally designed as temporary solutions, but in a growing number of cases they live on long after the initial crisis, emerging into informal societies. With this, a growing number of camp residents never have seen the home they claim the right to return to. In the Palestinian case today 1,5 million people live in UNRWA’s 58 camps, 70 years after the uprooting.

The beneficial effects of place attachment on individual and communal well- being are well established in people-place research. Attachment to places where the daily life takes place is essential, but the assumed temporality of refugee camps poses many challenges to this sense of home.The presentation is based on a case study in the neighborhood Shuafat in Jerusalem, Israel/oPt, which at core is an UNRWA refugee camp. However, with increasing housing prices in Jerusalem, Shuafat has become an attractive, affordable neighborhood for non-refugee Jerusalemites, and the past decade the neighborhood has grown from 20,000 to 80,000 inhabitants, of which 10,000 are registered refugees. Field work in Shuafat was carried out in the spring of 2018, and data is based on interviews with local professionals, natural observation, and mappings based on Tucker Cross’ Environmental Atmosphere Checklist (2004) and Gehl’s 12 Quality Criteria (2018).

The presentation argues that refugee camps are pivotal in the Palestinian identity as they showcase that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not yet is solved; the more dilapidated the camp is, the stronger the symbolism, and this creates a discrepancy between practical and ideological attachment. Shuafat’s intricate context thus challenges the commonplace idea of place attachment as inherently positive. The presentation traces a framework for place attachment during displacement, that rather seems ambivalent, patogeneous or by proxy, than salutogeneous, similarly to interpersonal attachment.