Refugee Camps

People have been fleeing since the beginning of time. Mostly conflicts and natural disasters, but also various other causes can be the reason for the migration of people across territories, looking for a better place. When we talk about displaced people, we often only think about war refugees who leave their homes and country in order to find safety somewhere else. But even in our ‘peaceful’ western world, free of war and terror, several kinds of fleeing can be designated. Although the underlying reasons aren’t as life-threatening, the act of leaving one place for another stays the same. In any case, the movement of a large amount of people, for whatever reason thinkable, has its spatial consequences.
In this essay I would like to talk about …show more content…
Ever since the beginning of time, humans have the need for shelter and safety. Architectural theoreticians like Vitruvius and Marc-Antoine Laugier describe the primitive hut as the origin of architecture. When we look at the standardised model for refugee camps, we see tents – mostly offered by humanitarian organizations – arranged in the form of a grid. The camp is organised hierarchically. It consists of different districts, each subdivided into smaller neighbourhoods. Districts are separated from each other by open spaces, neighbourhoods by roads or smaller paths. A perfect grid appears out of nowhere in the middle of an open …show more content…
Citizens lived in the bad conditions that came as a result of industrial growth of the city and were longing for the peacefulness and quietness of nature. Moreover, the idea that humankind could only truly unfold itself in its natural habitat arose. Men and city did not go together anymore and a flight out of the city commenced. The first initiatives were carried out by socialistic movements, transforming a large piece of rural land outside the city into a campground covered with nothing but some tents. A place to escape the city in the weekends found its existence. Soon, numerous citizens found their way to these campgrounds, which lead to the expansion of both their territorial boundaries and the amount of campgrounds available over the whole country. Concurrently tents were replaced by cabins or small houses, providing more comfort to its users, and service building were added to the terrain. Regional planning used the campgrounds as a way to limit the development of suburban fabric around the dense cities on the Westside of the country. As long as citizens could find leisure and recreation in the rural East, an uncontrollable growth of the cities could be avoided. Today, after some decades, it is clear that this strategy contributed to nothing but the opposite. Due to the growing prosperity after the nineteen-sixties, campgrounds made way for well designed holiday parks, providing a