Book Review - From Shelters To Dwelling: The Zaatari Refugee Camp by Ayham Dalal, 2022

Abstract

Ayham Dalal offers us a spatial repertoire on the radicality of the ‘housing’ question regarding refugees and their built environments. By focusing on the ‘tension between the shelter and the dwelling’, this book offers an exceptional reading of the imposed temporary materiality of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Dalal introduces ‘dwelling’ as a spatial practice, highlighting refugees' spatial agency in resisting and subverting the idea of liminality and, as Malaki (1992) proposes, falling outside the ‘natural order of things’. Through detailed case studies and visual representation, this book brings to the fore the dismantling and reassembling of given temporary structures to describe Syrian refugees' spatial agency in transforming the tent-furnished desert into ‘the third largest city in Jordan’.