This joint project between [A]FA and the United Nations agency UNIDO envisioned the conception and design of a recreational and educational facility within a IDP camp setting in Erbil, contributing to the overall UN project brief of “integrated stabilization, economic recovery and reconstruction support for displaced persons and returnees”. The project started with a research phase focusing on spatial, infrastructural, programmatic, socio-cultural and gender‐based factors regarding displacement in northern Iraq. Over the course of an initial field research trip in June 2016, Erbil and its camps were investigated to identify a site, and to define a programmatic and typological brief for an architectural infrastructure that would respond to both local demands and UNIDO’s agenda. Meetings with local authorities, camp managers, camp inhabitants, IOM and other UN organizations served to establish a better understanding of the situation at hand. Camps were visited respectively, with a focus on communal facilities and conversations about livelihood perspectives that took place during these visits. Data research on factual aspects of displacement within Kurdish Iraq, and on a global scale, was conducted to create a framework for the project.
Based on the insights gained from research on displacement, a programmatic concept and the design of a project was conceptualized for the Baharka Camp were developed - also located in Erbil. However, due to the tense political, humanitarian and infrastructural situations that occurred within the context of the Mosul offensive, the project needed to be adapted and translocated to Erbil’s Harsham Camp.
[A]FA’s project architect Stefanie Theuretzbacher designed the Harsham Camp Agricultural Training Center and supervised the contracted construction together with UNIDO’s on-site team. As part of the project, [A]FA commissioned Kieran Fraser Landscape Design to work on landscaping and a garden design, providing recreational space and bridging between the training facilities and the camp. The facility was officially inaugurated in September 2019. Already before the official inauguration, UNIDO had started conducting training programs at the Agricultural Training Center for inhabitants of the Harsham Camp.
Following up on this realization project, in September 2018, a team of three mapped the Harsham Camp in order to identify economic networks, habitats, and individual lives there, as well as to better connect the camp to the adjacent Agricultural Training Center and to further inform its operation. Jonathan Paljor´s “Channels of Distribution” investigates the access to staple food, fresh food, snacks and household goods that the inhabitants of Harsham Camp have, thereby identifying two parallel existing economic networks – one governed by the rations given out by UN organizations and NGOs, and one governed by the free market – which both operate on both global and local scales at the same time. In “Temporary & Permanent: The Invisible Structures”, Chien-Hua Huang looks in detail at how camp inhabitants transform and spatially adapt the given infrastructure and habitat of caravans into homes – thereby blurring the notions of “temporary” and “permanent”, “shelter” and “home” over time and making them ambiguous. Alejandra Loreto´s “Flowers in the Desert” is an intimate and personal inquiry into the emotional landscape in which Harsham camp inhabitants, particularly women, live and are faced with. As an attempt to place herself in these women’s situations, Loreto captured images of the multiple flowers that were present, even in spaces where the possibility of hope was challenged.
