Paper details

Paper authors	Marianne Potvin
In panel on	Post-Humanitarian Ecologies: from Spill-over Effects to Ambiguous Territorial Control in Chronic and Recurring Crises
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper offers an analytical and slightly historical take on the evolution of humanitarian actors’ approach to physical planning, urban development and the built environment since the early 1970s. The goal here is to situate the contemporary challenges faced by humanitarian organizations in a longer history, starting from the onset of the refugee protection system to the early 21st century. To tell this story, the paper uses urban theory and STS to trace the institutional and technological trajectories of spatial instruments, more specifically, the physical planning practices and geo-spatial technologies deployed and circulated by humanitarian actors in the course of their global assistance activities.

The paper begins with the emergence of the concept of human “habitat” as a new area of concern and new operational category for humanitarians in the mid-1970s. Drawing on archival research at the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), it argues that this period sees the making of holistic, longer-term, yet ambiguous human settlements approaches in humanitarian circles. This understudied moment starkly contrasts with the standardization trends and the predominance of the camp model that will come to characterize aid in the 1990s and beyond.

The premise for this work is that spatial instruments have played, and continue to play a strategic role in aid agencies’ claims to legitimacy and accountability. Addressing the mismatch between the humanitarian ‘kit-culture’ (Redfield, 2011)– a logic that conflates material standards and ethical norms – and the complexity of spatial planning is a first step in disentangling the multi-directional relationship between technological expertise, moral authority and political legitimacy within aid organizations.

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