A camp is meant to signify ‘temporary’. Nevertheless, people living in camps might spend decades there before moving on to other places, thereby transforming their temporal living space into their home. The ways in which families (re)program their habitat in the camp might be connected to their previous living conditions. Altogether, a new kind of community, a particular settlement pattern, and an ‘extra-urban’ condition emerges.

Media images of refugee and IDP camps are mostly superficial. The bulk of information, maps, and images that is distributed is primarily related to humanitarian aid and thus only comes in the form of basic supply charts and infrastructure infographics. Regarding shelter, insights on actual housing conditions or how families adapt their space and reuse (building) materials are missing.

This project traces the habitats of ten different families by portraying how they transform, extend, and re-fabri cate the caravans provided to them by UNHCR as shelters, houses, and homes. Through a series of detailed drawings, we are able to observe the temporal and the permanent, and past and present programmings of space. The work reveals the diver sity of the individual re-fabrications created by different families living in the Harsham Camp in Erbil.