Humanitarianism and the Housing Question

In the beginning of 2015, the global media began to report on Syrian refugees moving from the Jordanian cities where they could not find adequate housing back to refugee camps—camps that began to provide refuge not from war zones but from cities without affordable housing. I take the refugees’ repurposing of the refugee camp as a signal event—a critique of the way in which “innovations” in contemporary humanitarianism have effectively functioned to pose refugees as consumers in housing markets and thereby exacerbated competition for already-scarce affordable housing. As such, the action of the Syrian refugees vividly reveals how seemingly punctual humanitarian emergencies are displacing recognition of and response to the actually structural emergency of affordable housing in cities across the globe—a dynamic also unfolding in Chicago, the city where this panel takes place, which is supposedly offering “sanctuary” to undocumented immigrants while criminalizing the homeless.