Waiting places. Accademic dissertation over time and space in a weak contexts

Weak strategies for spaces of displacement the time and the space in refugee spaces, investigations on the territory and its inhabitants thesis of Francesca De Ponte – Sara Parrinello – Ginevra Rapisardi The aim of the thesis is to investigate the space of refugees, one among others places/non-places generated by crisis and war. Dealing with this issue we decided to move on two parallel tracks, the territorial one and the human one, and to consider two different but consequential moments, the settlement and the after-settlement. Before starting our investigations we want to clarify that our attitude in this research is the one of the wandering/errant , that, according with the Poetic of Relation by Glissant, we define as the one who attempt to conceive the totality, but gladly gives up the presumption to measure and possess it. The thesis wants to be a small contribution that reflects on a complex issue, more than give answers we would like to make questions, trying to find new strategies to improve the psychological condition of refugees and at the same time activate dynamics of territorial regeneration. We decided to name the refugee spaces as waiting places; the goal of the research is to imagine weak strategies through which design this wait and its consequences over time. The refugee spaces are conceived to face an emergency and to host people temporarily, but the temporary does not presume a specific duration, with the risk that the spaces become definitively temporary. What happen to these territories and their inhabitants during this frozen temporariness? How to inhabit the wait? What will these spaces become when the temporariness finish? Bauman ascribes to refugee spaces the image of “frozen transience”, a continuous status of impermanence that deny the experience of the long term and its consequences. This status of waiting dilated over time becomes a mental jail, Waquant defines it as an iper-ghetto where refugees learn how to survive, day by day in the immediacy of the moment. Living in segregated territories, at the margins of the system from which they are excluded, refugees are reduced to “bare life” (Agamben) the transience of the biological existence risk to cloud the biographical one. On the other hand, the territories that face an unexpected change in the use of soil, without a long-term project, often become over polluted environments that exacerbate the life condition of their inhabitants and loose the opportunity to have other uses after the settlement. Maria Gabriella Trovato writes about: “Refugee camps are refused landscape but they are reserve of ground, consumed but recyclable, waiting to be recognized. Wasted areas, not perceived, the act of design these areas can reveal unexpected landscapes.” We call our strategies weak strategies, using the term weak intended as something flexible and light, able to modify itself depending on the conditions. Our aim is to find strategies that could design the temporality of refugee spaces in order to make them more sustainable, in every way, and open to different possible futures. The interventions on those kind of spaces which have an uncertain future and a complex present should not be in our opinion thought as actions that turn upside down the system where they act. Rather the opposite, the interventions should interact with the existent situation, trying to mitigate it. The design parameter chosen to develop such a project is the ecology intended as the grade zero from which the project-process could start and evolve, the instrument able to work with time and that resists to it. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the ecological system become a great opportunity to think to the project as a process in progress, in motion. An architect, who wants to design on a soil that does not allow foundations, for an event of which he doesn’t know the duration, is forced to rethink the concept of firmitas and to find new instruments to imagine a removable modernity. We choose to develop the research focusing on the case of Lebanon, a small country who host more than everyone does. With a population of around six millions of people and 2 millions of refugees, Lebanon represent from a quantitative point of view and extreme case and with its controversial hosting polices an interesting situation to investigate. Even not recognizing the status of refugee, Lebanon host a huge number of Palestinian and Syrian people, who live in the cities and in the informal settlements spread in the territory. We imagine to develop ecological strategies for the informal settlement in the region of the Bekaa valley that is a crucial area near the Syrian borders to which displaced people flock in search of a safe refuge. The project proposal is structured as an ecological system of light infrastructures, using natural and infra-free devices, removable and weak. The imagined ecological systems fit into these fragile contexts integrating itself in them and at the same time generating regenerative mechanisms. Mechanism that could be a benefit for the inhabitants of the settlements and also for the hosting country. A fundamental characteristic of the system is that the devices are designed to generate social dynamics. Thanks to the landscape design they can generate public spaces for refugees, design with nature allows spaces to be flexible and open to different functions, economic measures but with a high qualitative level. In our strategies, through ecology, we aim to mitigate territories condition and psychological condition of their inhabitants. Putting in relation two different aims through a common intervention. The recreated space and the recreational one, the physical space and the psychological one, overlap without extinguish themselves one in the other their respective meanings.