In Search of Al Wehdat Camp: A Study of Paths, Edges and Walls and their Production of Transient Territories in Palestinian Refugee Camps

A Study of Paths, Edges and Walls and their Production of Transient Territories in Palestinian Refugee Camps

Abstract

Al Wehdat Camp, like all Palestinian refugee camps, was built in response to Al Nakba as a space of temporary refuge to generations of Palestinian refugees who were uprooted from their homes. In this research I have conceptualized home as a multiscalar territory that exists in different places and time intervals all at once through a spatio-temporal simultaneity. This produces Al Wehdat Camp as a transient territory existing here and there, now and then, at home and in exile. Through the different chapters of this dissertation, I studied those different scales of home — the home-land, the home-city, the home-camp and the home-home — through an interdisciplinary research approach and framework that is built around three pillars: the body, movement, and territory. I have also studied the socio-spatial relationship between these different territories and the boundary-demarcating elements that work on connecting and disconnecting these territories from one another, shaped by flows of movement and activity.

Through my interdisciplinary research methodology, encompassing methods from the fields of architecture, anthropology, and the visual arts, I conceptualized my research methodology as Taq’otat, or a set of spatio-temporal intersections with both the camp’s spaces and its inhabitants. I used my movement in the camp’s space along the vertical axis to shift along the different scales of home and also shift between the symbolic understanding of the camp and its intimate material reality; as well as my movement along the horizontal axis and my position within the camp relative to its inhabitants as a way to produce knowledge about the camp, its inhabitants and its architecture.

In my research I studied a number of paths of displacement that the Palestinian refugees have traveled across during their uprooting from Palestine, mapping their movement across the landscape and the different locations they have settled in, to reach Al Wehdat Camp. Through that tracing of different paths I was able to conceptualize the camp as a point that exists at the intersection of a number of paths that have led the Palestinian refugees to the camp and also allowed them to move past it to different locations within the city. This continuous movement of displaced bodies from Palestine to Al Wehdat Camp, with the embodied knowledge, memories, culture and traditions that Palestinian refugees have transferred with them has allowed them to transgress the colonial borders that have disconnected them from the space of the home-land, and allowed them to reproduce the space of Palestine in the space of Al Wehdat Camp.

The Palestinian refugees have also intergenerationally transferred that knowledge to the younger generations, who have constructed their own versions of an imagined home-land in the spaces of their home-camp. By tracing these paths of displacement, I have also been able to conceptualize the camp as a transient territory that transcends colonial borders and exists beyond its demarcations as a moving and transformative space which continues to move with the movement and activity of Palestinian refugees.

I have also studied the home-camp’s socio-spatial relationship with the homecity, shifting the scale of the investigation closer to the ground and investigating the boundary that distinguishes the territory of Al Wehdat Camp from the city of Amman. I created a comparison between the institutional ways of demarcating the camp, through the formal boundary or the redline, unchanged since the camp’s establishment in 1955, and the camp inhabitants’ ways of knowing and demarcating their camp through what I referred to as the informal boundary or the greenline. I was able to conclude that when putting Al Wehdat Camp in comparison with itself, moving the investigation inwards and studying the camp as a network of nodes, landmarks, streets, edges and districts, it becomes clear that it is neither homogeneous nor uniform, but rather, it is characterized by a multiplicity of spaces and lived realities that are the result of the interplay of power relations that continue to shape the camp’s lived reality and architecture. By stepping into the interiors of the lives of the Palestinian refugees, into the homes of the inhabitants, I was able to conclude how different and heterogeneous the camp inhabitants were and challenge the ways Palestinian refugees are represented as one homogeneous group with the same values and attitudes.

Through this dissertation, I have conducted a thorough investigation into Al Wehdat Camp, taking it as one example which, when studied, can help me better understand the political, the social and the economic factors that have influenced and transformed Palestinian camps in Jordan over the years. This investigation was carried out by studying its architecture as an expression of the shifts between these different factors, on a local and international scale. Through the work that I have produced in this research, I do not claim to have reached a conclusive and concrete understanding of what a Palestinian refugee camp is, and what makes a camp a camp, but I have worked on deconstructing the different material and immaterial layers that produce Al Wehdat Camp as a transient territory that transcends time, space and borders.