Humanitarianisms Housing Architecture Digital Slum Reform

7/25/2019 Humanitarianisms Housing Architecture Digital Slum Reform

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Andrew Herscher

HumanitarianismÕsHousing

Question: FromSlum Reform toDigital Shelter

ÒDigital Food,Ó ÒDigital Shelter,Ó andVoucher Humanitarianism

Some refugees from the current civil war in Syriahave fled to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey andfound themselves in novel spaces Ð novel notonly with respect to the spaces they fled from,but also with respect to the spaces occupied byprevious generations of refugees. These newspaces of refuge are structured by technologies

of credit distribution in the form of automatedteller machines and credit card readers: themeans by which the United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and theWorld Food Program (WFP) have been providingassistance to Syrian refugees with which topurchase food and rent shelter.1 This Òvoucherhumanitarianism,Ó undertaken in partnershipwith credit card companies, mobile phonecompanies, banks, and other businesses, hasalready yielded what MasterCard and the WFPcall Òdigital food,Ó as well as a form of housing

relief that, replacing the refugee camp, willdoubtlessly soon invoke the term Òdigitalshelter.Ó2

In one of the most recent innovations invoucher humanitarianism, all Syrian refugeesarriving in Jordan are added to a biometricdatabase. At Jordanian ATMs equipped with irisscanners, these refugees can be identified by irisscans rather than by ATM cards and PIN codes:

Instead of receiving food packages, moneyvouchers or bank cards from the UNHCR,refugees in the iris-identification systemreceive a monthly text message sayingmoney has been placed in their accounts.Then, they walk up to an ATM owned byCairo Amman Bank, and, rather than inserta card and punch in a pass code, they lookinto a specially designed iris camera. OnceIDÕd, a refugee would be able to withdrawhis or her monthly allotment of cash.3

Two rationales have been offered for irisscanning, each based on the increased efficiencyof aid distribution that this scanning presumably

permits: while refugees can Òaccess their moneyin a secure way without having to keep track of acard and number,Ó scanning will also Òhelpthwart refugee fraud.Ó4 And yet, voucherhumanitarianism has also brought about a newrelationship between humanitarianism and thehousing market. With the control of refugeebodies no longer predicated on the spatialboundaries of the refugee camp, thedevelopment of a system of housing vouchers forrefugees allows the housing market to at leastnotionally accommodate the provision of shelter

even in states of humanitarian emergency. Fromsubstandard working class housing in

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ÒSyrian refugee Ali Ahmad Farhat holds his MasterCard/World Food Program e-card as others stand in line to receive theirs, at a basketball court inNabatiyeh, Lebanon.Ó Photo: MasterCard, 2013.

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A Syrian refugee scans her iris at an ATM at a branch of Cairo Amman Bank, Amman, Jordan. Photo: UNHCR, 2015.

industrializing cities of nineteenth-centuryEngland to the neighborhoods of foreclosedmiddle class housing in post-2008 US cities, thecapitalist housing market has repeatedly beenposed as a crisis or emergency, structurallyunable to provide adequate levels of affordablehousing; now, with the advent of Òdigital shelter,Óprecisely the same housing market is beingposed as a response to housing crises and

emergencies. It is revealing, then, to examine voucherhumanitarianism not only in the context of thenew technologies that enable it Ð by far thepredominant way in which it has beeninvestigated Ð but also in the context ofhumanitarian history. In a recent essay, DanielBertrand Monk and I have argued thathumanitarianism and architecture have shared,for much of their modern histories, apreoccupation with housing and, specifically, thequestion of how to house those living in

particularly precarious circumstances.5

In termsof this history, the refugee camp might representone of the last places where the interests ofhumanitarianism and architecture haveintersected; with the emergence of Òdigitalshelter,Ó the refugee camp is in effect privatized,its functions distributed across city-as-such, no

matter its condition. Normalizing precarity, thisrendering disposes of the housing question as aprovocation to envision other forms of housing, ifnot other ways of living in common. Whenhousing questions are answered by the existinghousing market, in other words, the marketÕsstructural inadequacies and inequities areassumed and reproduced; to think aboutadequate housing for the displaced and

impoverished is to problematize the conditionsand situations that displace and impoverishvulnerable communities and to inviteimagination of different conditions and newsituations in which adequate housing is apolitical right rather than economic reward. The

technological novelty of Òdigital shelter,Ó that is,

maps precisely onto a closure of political futures.

Humanitarianism and the HousingQuestion

Histories of modern humanitarianism typically

locate its origin in the initiatives that emerged toameliorate the suffering of victims of Europeanwar in the 1850s and Õ60s Ð the initiatives thatlead to the founding of the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross, the event thatusually inaugurates the humanitarian project.But just as the suffering of soldiers on European

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Detail of London Poverty Map, 1889, from Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan,1889). ÒThe streets are coloured according to the general condition of the inhabitantsÓ; black indicates Òlowest class,vicious, semi-criminal,Ó dark blue indicates Òvery poor, casual, chronic want,Ó and blue indicates Òpoor.Ó

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battlefields was becoming an object of theconcern now called Òhumanitarian,Ó so too wasthe suffering of the working class in EnglandÕsindustrializing cities becoming an object ofconcern to reformers, philanthropists, andrevolutionaries. Some of the preceding drew animplicit relation between the violence takingplace on battlefields and the violence takingplace in industrializing cities, with the latter

placed in the context of what Friedrich Engelscalled a Òsocial warÓ and what others, workingclass and bourgeois alike, saw at variousmoments in early nineteenth-century England asincipient war-as-such.6

Working-class suffering was often analyzed,managed, and responded to through housing. Inso doing, myriad concerns about poverty,morality, public health, social hygiene, laborproductivity, and social stability manifested ininvestigations of housing conditions and calls forhousing reform. Historians of Victorian-era

housing reform have often used the termÒhumanitarianÓ to describe their object of study,although the term was not widely used in reformdiscourse itself.7 The term Òhumanity-monger,Óhowever, was deployed, at times critically,against Victorian-era reformers, and at timesaffirmatively, by those reformers themselves. Inboth cases, housing reform was marked as aproto-humanitarianism and the bifurcated statusof the term ÒhumanitarianÓ Ð also used bothderisively and approvingly when it emerged atthe end of the nineteenth century in English Ðwas anticipated as well. And so, traveling through and reporting onnorthern EnglandÕs industrializing cities in theearly 1840s, William Cooke Taylor was critical ofÒhumanity-mongersÓ who advocated the end ofchild labor without recalling that Òthat laborbrings wages, and that wages bring bread.Ó8 ButÒwe are humanity-mongers,Ó wrote ThomasBeames a few years later, in support of anattempt to replace LondonÕs rookeries withmodel housing.9 And while Marx and Engels inThe Communist Manifesto explicitlydistinguished themselves from ÒhumanitariansÓ

Ð as well as from philanthropists, utopians,organizers of charity, improvers of the conditionsof the working class, members of societies forthe prevention of cruelty to animals, and manyother contemporary do-gooders besides ÐEngels addressed Òthe working classes of GreatBritainÓ only a few years earlier, in the onlysection of The Condition of the Working Class in

England written in English, as Òmembers of thegreat and universal family of Mankind, who knowtheir interests and that of all the human race tobe the sameÓ Ð a humanitarianism in form if not

in name.10

Lodging House, Field Lane, London, from Hector Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings (London: J. Churchill, 1848).

The writing of Cooke Taylor, Beames, andEngels contributed to a voluminous discourse inVictorian-era England composed of magazineand newspaper articles, commission reports,pamphlets, books, and legislation on whatEngels, along with many less recognized others,called Òthe condition of the working class.Ó Thiscondition was primarily addressed throughhousing Ð the inadequate and dangerousaccommodations that this class was forced tooccupy. In his account of English housing reform,the architectural historian Robin Evans pointedto the only image in Hector GavinÕs 1848 Sanitary

Ramblings Ð a section of a lodging house inLondonÕs Bethnal Green, showing disease in thebasement, drunkenness on the ground floor, andsexual promiscuity in the attic Ð as a descriptionof Òthe intimate bond between physical andmoral degradation.Ó11 Following Gavin, who wrotethat there were actually no lodging houses inBethnal Green, Evans mentions that the imagewas an emblematic composite rather than adepiction of an actual building.12 But the

inclusion of the image also testifies to theimportance of architecture in general, andhousing in particular, as mediations of thetargets of GavinÕs reformist ambitions. EvansÕsargument that Òwhat we now refer to as decenthomes have their origin in the indecencies to befound [in the rookery den]Ó can be extended intothe claim that housing, in the guise of rookeriesand model homes alike, was the medium inwhich Victorian reformers represented the socialproblems they addressed and, in many cases,the solutions they proposed.13

Perhaps chief among these problems wasthe moral failings of the working class. In James

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Interior of Ikea ÒBetter ShelterÓ prototype, Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Erbil, Iraq, 2015. Photo: Ikea/Better Shelter, 2015.

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GrantÕs 1837 book The Great Metropolis Ð a self-styled examination of Òthe condition of theworking classes of [London]Ó Ð the author urgedhis middle-class readers to Ògo to theirdwellings,Ó where they will find, Òin the greatmajority of cases, scenes of wretchedness É[that] are the result of intemperate andimprovident habits.Ó14 Similarly, in the 1853 bookThe Million-Peopled City , Reverend John

Garwood declared to his readers that Òwhereverin London É a Rookery exists, we may be assuredthat it is inhabited by the Irish.Ó15 Reporting onManchester, Cooke Taylor pointed out that Òeventhe factory operatives are badly lodged, and thedwellings of the class below them are the mostwretched that can be conceived,Ó but heconcluded that this Ògreat destitution anddelinquency É arises from a class of immigrantsand passengers.Ó16 Similarly, Peter GaskellÕs

Artisans and Machinery, which Engels partlyrelied upon in his famous examination of English

working-class housing, described ManchesterÕspoor as Òdebased alike by penury, want ofeconomy, and dissolute habits.Ó17 And one ofEngelsÕs direct predecessors, James P. Kay-Shuttleworth, wrote in The Moral and Physical

Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the

Cotton Manufacture in Manchester that:

We have exposed É the condition of thelower orders connected with themanufactures of this town, because weconceive that the evils affecting themresult from foreign and accidental causes. Asystem, which promotes the advance ofcivilization, and diffuses it all over theworld Ð which promises to maintain thepeace of nations, by establishing apermanent international law É cannot beinconsistent with the happiness of the

great mass of people.18

Here, in exactly inverted form, was the systemicanalysis that Engels would soon pursue Ð ananalysis that Òmight be used in the service ofreform or as apologetics É [or] as both

simultaneously.Ó19

In the service of reform, architectural

methodologies to investigate the condition of theworking class extended into an architectural

politics of ameliorating the suffering andcontaining the threat of the working class. Thispolitics was chiefly oriented around threeambitions: slum clearance; legislation onsanitation, ventilation, and overcrowding; andthe construction of new housing. In his Notes of a

Tour, then, Cooke Taylor reported on a meeting ofthe Statistical Section of the British Association

in Manchester in 1841 Ð the year before Engelsarrived in the city Ð where it was argued that

Òthe high rate of mortality in Manchester wasowing to the want of drainage, ventilation, etc.,and not to the factory system.Ó20 A year later,EnglandÕs most famous social reformer, EdwinChadwick, wrote that Òatmospheric impurity É[is] greater or less in different places, accordingas there is more or less sufficient drainage ofhouses, streets, roads, and land, combined withmore or less sufficient means of cleansing and

removing solid refuse and impurities.Ó21

Thisimpurity is exactly what Hector Gavininvestigated Ð or invented Ð in his ÒsanitaryramblingsÓ through Bethnal Green in 1848.According to the pythogenic theory of disease,epidemics derived from the noxious gasesemanating from decomposing organic matter;GavinÕs public health campaign thus focused onsewage networks, waste removal facilities, andthe Òdisease mistÓ that they yielded.

ÒDisease Mist,Ó Bethnal Green, London, 1847, from Hector Gavin,Sanitary Ramblings (London: J. Churchill, 1848).

Many other reformers pointed to ÒslumsÓ asthe problem. In his magisterial Life and Labour of

the People in London, Charles Booth called theslum a Òpoverty trapÓ which renders itsoccupants ÒdisreputableÓ; for Booth, theseoccupants would fall from poverty and chronicwant into what he called viciousness andcriminality.22 For some reformers, slums were to

be destroyed in conjunction with theconstruction of new and adequate housing forthe poor: ÒIt behooves the state both to destroythe localities which are the centres of diseaseand death,Ó reformer S. C. Paul argued, Òand toprovide healthier accommodation for theinhabitants of them.Ó23 But these healthieraccommodations were rarely provided, and evenwhen they were, primarily by model dwellingassociations, they selected out those most inneed; Òthe poor,Ó as another reformer noted, Òarenot always a desirable class of tenants.Ó24 Other

reformers simply held that Òthere is little doubtthat the sweeping away of the worst slums shove

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Azraq Refugee Camp, Jordan, Òbuilt to try to relieve towns and cities of the burden of hosting massive numbers of Syrians whohad fled to Jordan to escape the conflict.Ó Photo: EU/ECHO/Caroline Gluck, 2015.

people into better houses.Ó25 Summarizing thistrajectory of analysis in The Housing Question,

Arthur Wesley Compton declared that ÒtheHousing Question É lies at the root of other greatsocial questions.Ó26

In many of the answers given to thatquestion in Victorian England,ÒhumanitarianismÓ and ÒarchitectureÓ becamepractically indistinguishable. But the reforms

and proposals of humanitarian architecturedisplaced, deferred, or inverted the project laidout in EngelsÕs The Condition of the Working Class

in England. Some four decades later, moreover,they formed the target of his examination of thehousing question, where he argued that it isÒonly by the solution of the social question, thatis, by the abolition of the capitalist mode ofproduction, [that] the solution of the housing

question is made possible.Ó27

Nevertheless, when Engels investigated thecondition of the working class in England, he

focused first and foremost on housing, just likehis reform-minded predecessors,contemporaries, and successors. Drawing uponwriters like Gaskell as well as his owninvestigation, Engels reported on what werealready tropes of working class slums: Ònarrow,crooked, filthy streetsÓ filled with garbage and

excrement, animal and human; overcrowded,dirty, and tumbledown dwellings (Òif they evendeserve the name!Ó); Òdefiance of allconsiderations of cleanliness, ventilation, andhealthÓ; and Òmoral ruin.Ó Engels also madeample use of what housing reformer ErnestDewsnup called Òa favorite method of Ôwriting upÕthe housing problem É [which] is to pick outextreme cases on insanitation and overcrowding,

dwelling upon the evils such conditions arecapable of exerting upon the physical welfare ofthe community.Ó28

What distinguishes EngelsÕs account,however, is his analysis of architecturalphenomena. ÒEverything which here [inManchester] arouses horror and indignation,ÓEngels argued, Òbelongs to the industrial epoch.ÓInadequate housing was thereby related to thenecessarily precarious existence of reserve labor,the payment of subsistence wages by employersextracting surplus value from workers, and the

profits secured by builders. Instead of appealingto the state or to elites for ameliorativeintervention, Engels implicated both in thecondition that needed to be ameliorated. In sodoing, the home, perhaps the primary form ofprivate property in Victorian England, wasrecruited to critique an inequitable distribution

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of wealth and to call for Òthe expropriation of theexpropriators.Ó

The Privatization of Humanitarianism andthe Refugee as Housing Consumer

As the systems, ideologies, and politics ofhumanitarianism developed, particularly afterthe Second World War, the question of housingincreasingly began to be asked not with

reference to working-class communities inindustrializing cities, but communities displacedby war, disasters, and other emergencies.According to Michel Agier, the attention paid toplacing displaced communities, along with othercollective outcasts, at a distance from Europeanmetropoles rendered the twentieth century aÒcentury of campsÓ: an era in which the campÕsprovision of temporary shelter became well-nighpermanent.29 A turn from ÒreliefÓ toÒdevelopmentÓ in humanitarianism during the1970s and Õ80s only intensified

humanitarianismÕs investment in housing, withattention to refugee camps augmented byattention to improvements in substandardhousing as preventative measures against thethreats and dangers of disaster.30

The subsequent and still ongoingprivatization of humanitarianism, however, hasaltered the status of the camp in humanitarianthought and practice. This privatization receivedits institutional mandate in 1999 when theUnited NationÕs ÒGlobal Compact,Ó released atthe World Economic Forum in Davos, announcedan intention to Òharness the energy andinfluence of multinational corporations to act asgood corporate citizens.Ó31 Following suchpartnerships as those between the Coca-ColaCompany and the United Nations DevelopmentProgram, the Pfizer Corporation and the UnitedNations ChildrenÕs Fund, and the United ParcelService and CARE International, thehumanitarian housing question also became atarget of corporate expertise.32 This first playedout in the context of the refugee camp, with theIkea Foundation establishing a partnership withthe UNHCR to develop a new form of temporary

shelter. The resulting ÒRefugee Housing UnitÓ Ðultimately rebranded as the ÒBetter ShelterÓ Ðwas designed to be shipped in flat packs,assembled without additional tools andequipment, and last for three years, two-and-a-half years longer than the tarpaulin shelters itwas intended to replace. In March 2015 the Ikea Foundationannounced that the UNHCR ordered tenthousand ÒBetter SheltersÓ for immediatedeployment the following summer.33 Applyingtechniques of consumer furniture design,

construction, and delivery to refugee housing,this deployment integrates that housing to some

degree into the consumer housing market. But just this integration was enormously furtheredwith the almost simultaneous advent of voucherhumanitarianism, as the emergence of ÒdigitalshelterÓ allows Ð or compels Ð refugees toparticipate directly in the housing market asconsumers in their own right. The smoothing of distinctions betweenhumanitarianism and capitalist consumerism is

typically regarded Ð from the perspectives ofhumanitarianism and capitalism alike Ð asÒprogress.Ó As a typical claim asserts, Òwithsignificant logistical abilities, massive resourcesinvested in R&D and highly capable personnel,many within the aid community hope thatbusinesses can do for humanitarian aid whatAmazon did for the world of retail or whatMicrosoft and Apple did for personalcomputing.Ó34 But the humanitarian history of thehousing question reveals that ÒbusinessesÓ donot only facilitate humanitarian aid, but also

facilitate some of the conditions thathumanitarianism responds to. It is this status ofÒbusinessÓ Ð which is to say, the status ofcapitalismÕs structural violence Ð which iseffaced in the privatization of humanitarianism.The inequalities, deprivations, and oppressionsof this violence, business as usual in the frame ofcapitalism, thereby become business as usual inthe frame of humanitarianism as well.35

In this sense, it is not at all accidental thatthe technological innovation of Òdigital shelter,Ówhich forces refugees to compete forsubstandard housing with working class renters,brings precise economic benefits to propertyowners in the form of increased housingdemand, along with increased social suffering tocommunities denied affordable housing. This isalready becoming apparent in Jordan, where anestimated 80 percent of registered Syrianrefugees are residing outside of refugee camps,for the most part in the countryÕs mostimpoverished municipalities. There, refugees arestruggling with and against poor and working-class residents for affordable housing. In thesummer of 2014, according to one NGO,

The rapid influx of Syrian refugees intonorthern Jordan has directly impacted thehousing market, driving up rental pricesand exacerbating an already acute lack ofhousing. This challenging situation hasforced many to resort to coping strategiessuch as sharing living quarters É andimprovising makeshift shelters with limitedaccess to basic services.36

Most recently, beginning in 2015 and continuing

to the present, reports have emerged of Syrianrefugees moving from Jordanian cities back into

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refugee camps: these are camps that are now

providing refuge not from war zones, but from

cities without affordable housing.37 Thedisaggregation of humanitarianism andarchitecture through the advent of ÒdigitalshelterÓ has thereby returned to the housingquestion that solicited their aggregation almostone hundred years earlier. While the wars atstake in contemporary humanitarianism begin

and end, the social war Òof each against eachÓcontinues unabated, with the inextricableconnection between these two wars becomingever more difficult to comprehend Ð except,perhaps, to those who endeavor to survive them. !

Andrew Herscher is an Associate Professor at theUniversity of Michigan with appointments in theTaubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning,Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, andDepartment of Art History. He is the author of Violence

Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo

Conflict, published in 2010 by Stanford UniversityPress, and The Unreal Estate Guide to

Detroit, published in 2012 by the University ofMichigan Press.

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1On voucher humanitarianism,see Paul Harvey, Cash andVouchers in Emergencies(London: Overseas DevelopmentInstitute, 2005) and GabrielleSmith et al., New Technologies inCash Transfer Programming andHumanitarian Assistance(Oxford: Cash LearningPartnership, 2011). This essaydraws upon and extends ananalysis of voucherhumanitarianism in Daniel

Bertrand Monk and AndrewHerscher, ÒThe NewUniversalism: Refuges andRefugees between GlobalHistory and VoucherHumanitarianism,Ó Grey Room61, forthcoming.

2Through the ÒDigital FoodÓprogram, MasterCard and theWFP have partnered to developprepaid debit cards for Syrianrefugees in Turkey and Lebanon;see MasterCard, ÒMasterCardand the United Nations WorldFood Programme in Partnershipto Deliver ÔDigital FoodÕ,Ó pressrelease, September 13, 2012

https://www.wfp.org/stories/mastercard-and-wfp-team-deliver-digital-food; and World FoodProgramme, ÒMeet our PartnersÓhttps://www.wfp.org/partners/private-sector/meet-our-partners/mastercard

3Dina Fine Maron, ÒEye-ImagingID Unlocks Aid Dollars for SyrianCivil War Refugees,Ó Scientific

American, September 18, 2013;see also Gaelle Sundelin, ÒIris-Scanning TechnologyStreamlines RefugeeRegistration Process Ð UNHCR,Ó

Jordan Times, July 21, 2013http://www.growthgate.com/im

agesadmin/articles_pdf/14022001551938.pdf

4Maron, ibid.

5Monk and Herscher, ÒThe NewUniversalism.Ó

6ÒThe social war, the war of eachagainst each, is here openlydeclaredÓ: see Friedrich Engels,The Condition of the WorkingClass in England, trans. W. O.Henderson and W. H. Chaloner(Oxford: Blackwell, 1958 [1845]),

69. 7See, for example, Anthony S.Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housingand Social Policy in VictorianLondon (London: Edward Arnold,1977), xiii; Neil Kunze,ÒHousing,Ó in Victorian Britain:

An Encyclopedia, ed. SallyMitchell (New York: Garland,1988), 379; Christopher Hamlin,Public Health and Social Justicein the Age of Chadwick (NewYork: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), 4; and CarolynTaylor, ÒHumanitarian Narrative:Bodies and Detail in Late-Victorian Social Work,Ó British

Journal of Social Work 38 (2008).

8William Cooke Taylor, Notes of aTour in the ManufacturingDistricts of Lancashire (London:Duncan and Malcolm, 1842),238.

9Thomas Beames, The Rookeriesof London (London: Frank Cassand Co., 1970 [1850]), 169.

10Friedrich Engels, ÒTo the

Working Classes of GreatBritain,Ó in Engels, The Conditionof the Working Class in England,28.

11Robin Evans, ÒRookeries andModel Dwellings: EnglishHousing Reform and theMoralities of Private Space,Ó inTranslations from Drawing toBuilding (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1997), 95.

12Hector Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings (London: Frank Cassand Co., 1971 [1848]), 68.

13Evans, ÒRookeries and ModelDwellings,Ó 94.

14James Grant, The GreatMetropolis (New York: Saundersand Otley, 1837), 313Ð14; 293.Grant pluralized Òworking classÓbecause he thought that Òabouttwenty classes would comprisethe leading and prominentportions of the poorer ordersÓ;these included Òthe pauper,ÓÒthe lodging-house class,Ó Òtheforeigner,Ó Òthe Jew,Ó and Òtheskilled artisan,Ó among others.See The Great Metropolis, iv.

15Reverend John Garwood, TheMillion-Peopled City; or One Half of the People of London MadeKnown to the Other Half (London:Wertheim and Macintosh, 1853),314.

16Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 11Ð14.

17Peter Gaskell, Artisans andMachinery: The Moral andPhysical Condition of theManufacturing PopulationConsidered with Reference toMechanical Substitutes for

Human Labour (London: J. W.Parker, 1836), 83, 2.

18James P. Kay-Shuttleworth, TheMoral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed inthe Cotton Manufacture inManchester (London: JamesRidgway, 1832), 47.

19Steven Marcus, Engels,Manchester, and the WorkingClass (New York: Random House,1974), 55. Posing Òbad housingÓas Òthe result of bad livingÓ onthe part of the poor continued,of course, through the twentieth

century and into the present:see, for example, Ernest Ritson

Dewsnup, The Housing Problemin England: Its Statistics,Legislation, and Policy (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1907), 18.

20Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 262.

21Edwin Chadwick, Report on theSanitary Condition of theLabouring Population of GreatBritain, ed. M. W. Flinn

(Edinburgh, 1965 [1842]), 79.

22Charles Booth, The Life andLabour of the People in London,vol. 3 (London: Macmillan1903),120. ÒBecause 19th c.improvement schemes werechiefly demolition schemes theyinvariably increasedovercrowdingÓ: see Enid Gauldie,Cruel Habitations: A History of Working-Class Housing,1780Ð1918 (London: GeorgeAllen and Unwin, 1974), 85.

23S. C. Paul, ÒEvictions in London,ÓMacMillanÕs Magazine,October

1882, 498. See also WilliamTorrens, ÒWhat is to be Donewith the Slums?Ó MacMillanÕsMagazine, April 1879. Onhousing demolition andconstruction in VictorianEngland, see Robert F. Haggard,The Persistence of VictorianLiberalism: The Politics of SocialReform in Britain, 1870Ð1900(Westport, CT: Greenwood,2001), 156.

24James Hole, The Homes of theWorking Classes, withSuggestions for their Improvement (London:Longmans and Green, 1866), 42.

25Charles M. Allen, ÒThe Genesisof British UrbanRedevelopment,Ó EconomicHistory Review 18:3 (1965): 612.

26Arthur Wesley Compton, TheHousing Question (London: LandAgents Record, 1901), 3.

27Frederick Engels, The HousingQuestion (London: Lawrence andWishart, 1942 [1872]), 18.

28

Dewsnup, The Housing Problemin England, iÐii.

29As described by Agier, ÒIf the20th century in Europe was theÔcentury of camps,Õ what ishappening on the world scaletoday is the extension andgreater sophistication of variousforms of camps that make up amechanism for keeping awayundesirables and foreigners ofall kinds Ð refugees, displaced,ÔrejectedÕÓ: see Michel Agier,Managing the Undesirables:Refugee Camps andHumanitarian Government,trans. David Fernbach

(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011),3Ð4.

30See, for example, Fred Cuny,Disasters and Development (NewYork: Oxford University Press,1983).

31United Nations, ÒSecretary-General Proposes GlobalCompact on Human Rights,Labour, Environment, Address toWorld Economic Forum inDavos,Ó press release

SG/SM/688, 1999http://www.un.org/press/en/1999/19990201.sgsm6881.html

32See Stacey White, CorporateEngagement in Natural Disaster Response: Piecing Together theValue Chain (Washington, DC:Center for Strategic andInternational Studies, 2012).

33United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees, ÒASafe Place to Call Home,Ó 2012http://www.unhcr.org/pages/52a5c44f6.html; Ikea Foundation,ÒA Home Away From Home,Ó

March 24, 2015http://www.ikeafoundation.org/better-shelter/

34Steven A. Zyck and JustinArmstrong, Humanitarian Crises,Emergency Preparedness andResponse: The Role of Businessand the Private Sector (London:Overseas Development Institute,2014), 5.

35See Slavoj "i#ek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York:Picador, 2008).

36

REACH, Housing and Tensions in Jordanian Communities HostingSyrian Refugees, June 2014http://www.reach-initiative.org/?s=housing+and+tensions+in+jordanian+communities

37Teresa Walsh, ÒSyrian RefugeesMove Back to Camps in Jordan,ÓUS News and World Report,January 28, 2015http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/01/28/syrian-refugees-move-back-to-camps-in-jordan; ÒOver 3,000 SyrianRefugees Return to Azraq CampFrom Urban Areas Ð UNHCR,Ó

Jordan Times, August 3, 2015http://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/over-3000-syrian-refugees-return-azraq-camp-urban-areas-%E2%80%94-unhcr

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