Urbanizing refuge: interrogating spaces of displacement

Romola Sanyal

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Refugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under-explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that is still un-urban. This article challenges this idea of the camp as space of pure biopolitics and explores the politics of space in the refugee camp using urban debates. Using case studies from the Middle East and South Asia, it looks at how the refugee spaces developed and became informalized, and how people recovered their agency through ‘producing spaces’ both physically and politically. In doing so, it draws connections between refugee camps and other spaces of urban marginality, and suggests that refugee spaces can be seen as important sites for articulating new politics.

Keywords: refugee; urban; informality; exception; agency; Lebanon; Middle East; India; South Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-iue
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, March, 2014, 38(2), pp. 558-572. ISSN: 0309-1317

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:52160

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