Jordan’s Grassroots, Black-Market, DIY City

Michael Kimmelman
reports from the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan:

Syria is only a few miles away.
From the camp one can feel the shelling. A farmer back home and
jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Bidawi arrived here with his wife and
children a year ago, only to have his youngest daughter die in the
camp, overwhelmed by tear gas fired when guards struggled to quell
a riot. Everyone in Zaatari has horror stories about homes
destroyed, family members lost and bad times in the camp.

But now, at a pace stunning to see, Zaatari is becoming an informal
city: a sudden, do-it-yourself metropolis of roughly 85,000 with
the emergence of neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy
and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy,
though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel
agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza
delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp
officials are scrambling to copy.

The change, accelerated by regional chaos and enterprising Syrians,
illustrates a basic civilizing push toward urbanization that
clearly happens even in desperate places—people leaving their stamp
wherever they live, making spaces they occupy their
own.

Kimmelman contrasts this informal order with a more tightly
controlled camp elsewhere in the country:

Azraq, located miles from anywhere, is strictly
policed, with fixed, corrugated metal shelters in military order,
dirt floors and shameful public toilets, and it has no electricity.
So far about 11,000 Syrians are marooned there. The camp is planned
to house more than 100,000.

Refugees at Azraq, families with small children, terrified at night
without electricity to light the shelters, unprotected against the
scorpions, mice and snakes, say they escaped one nightmare to
arrive at another.

The oldest parts of Zaatari, by contrast, now have streets, one or
two paved, some lined with electric poles, the most elaborate
houses cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and
shipping containers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and
jerry-built sewers. Clusters of satellite dishes and water tanks on
the skyline can bring to mind favelas in Rio de Janeiro or slums in
Cairo. Like favelas, the camp has grown according to its own ad
hoc, populist urban logic, which includes a degree of social
mobility.

Kimmelman credits Kilian Kleinschmidt, the U.N.’s man in
Zaatari, with accepting the emerging city and “slowly formalizing
the camp’s economy.” But don’t think for a moment that he has tamed
the place: