Cathrine Brun writes:
I had the great honour of being invited to participated in a
panel debate at the American University of Beirut (AUB) on 10 September 2018 to
launch a new report titled Refugees as City-Makers, edited by Mona Fawaz, Ahmad
Gharbieh, Mona Harb and Dounia Salamé at AUB:
The innovative report approaches forced migration through
the lens of individual and collective agency and focusing on the transformative
impact that refugees have on urban space as home-makers, city navigators,
political subjects and urban producers, largely but no solely in Beirut. The
ways in which individual experiences, agency, resilience and humanity are
explored in the report and the innovative and creative methods that have been
developed and adopted for the study of forced migrants in the city stand out as
a significant contribution.
I very much enjoyed reading the report. The report is
written with an energy that inspires, and with insights that challenge the
reader in multiple ways. Many reflections and ideas came up in the course of
reading the report and my short commentary presented in the debate is summarised
below in three points.
First, the report
contributes to addressing the urban itself. The humanitarian community and
forced migration researchers are still to come to terms with the urban. We need
new ways of creating knowledge about the urban: and forced migrants as a constitutive
part of the city, and there are many examples in the report of how we can
further these insights. The interesting inclusions in the report of refugees’
material and immaterial practices in refugee camps and so-called informal
tented settlements bring out the perspective of the urban in very particular
ways. The often open spaces transformed by building and dwelling in camps stand
in stark contrast to the already built up, dense material environment of the
urban neighbourhood where people learn, but also changes, the landscape. Emphasising
both mobility and neighbourhoods – the interaction between flows and stillness
– is a particularly important way to analyse the city and refugees as city
makers. I think this point is excellently portrayed in multiple ways and one
example is the poem on page 122: The sleeper, the waiter, the wanderer and the
bystander.
The way the urban is approached also then very much connects
with my second point: which is the
rich ways in which several authors point out the paradoxes of forced migration
in the city. In particular these paradoxes come out in the discussion of the
legal status: how challenging it is to be without a status and how creatively
many refugees without status manoeuvre and negotiate the city and how networks
are relied upon in that process. We also learn about the profound implications
and uncertainty that the lack of status produce. Simultaneously, different
contributions show so well the changing dynamics of legal status and how, even
with status, refugees are often leading very precarious lives.
With all this richness it really touched me to read Dima
El-Khoury’s statement on page 99 when she says: “it is virtually impossible for
Syrians today to develop a healthy, comfortable situation in Lebanon”.
Much more research must go into understanding the
implication of status and we need that urgently, because it is not sufficiently
problematized in the current global policies for refugees and migrants.
This brings me to my third
point: the ways in which forced migrants use, resent and relate to the
humanitarian category of ‘refugees’: It differs so much from situation to
situation and also within one group of forced migrants. The report shows the
need for always understanding the contextualised meaning of these labels and
categories that are at the same time universal but extremely localised. A
strong testament is the Syrian men in their 20s and 30s living in Getawi who
rejects the label refugee and use the urban context to enable reclassification
based on the geopolitical landscape that emerge in the city through flags,
banners and other symbols. Through these stories we can understand the role of
the refugee label in the city and its changing character produced in the
dynamics between the refugees and the city. The presentation of banners about
refugees in the urban landscape is overwhelming and the analysis of those
banners on page 87 is telling when it shows that the word ‘displaced’ only
appears twice on those banners.
Here is also the place where I would like to introduce the
dimension that I missed: I get a clear sense of the ways that the refugees are
city-makers. That they create an alternative image of Beirut portrayed in the
maps presented, but I would have loved to see how that alternative image is
more actively encountered, engaged with and negotiated by others who are
adjusting to these alternative maps. These may the unheard voices in the report:
and we can argue that they often get enough space, and that it is not the
purpose with this publication to provide those voices. However, more insights
into the interaction between different groups of city makers – like more
established groups in the city – could contribute to further understand the way
the refugee label is used in the production of the city. While it is a big
task, it could potentially help to develop this enormously rich material and to
theorise beyond Beirut and back into a general understanding of the urban,
which was my first point.
There is much more to say, and I am sure the report will
continue to create debate and inspiration for further study. So I leave it with
the conclusion that this is certainly a publication that I will be using in
teaching and research and I hope that the research results will be analysed
further, synthesised further and that more comes out of it.
