The scales of attachment: exploring territory attachment at Nahr el-Bared refugee camp and the mechanisms to overcome transience

Abstract

Refugee camps, as emergency responses, embodies a hall of characteristics marked by the permanent temporariness. However, they gradually evolve, becoming informal urban settlements. Nahr el-Bared, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon adopted as the case study, is an example of how communities develop strategies to overcome transience. Although the improvement of the urban environment plays an important role, the extensive fieldwork brought to light that aspects related to the economic condition and the forms of control, which generates visible and invisible barriers, deeper affects living conditions and aspirations. The analysis of cultural aspects and how these aspects are materialized, combined with an ethnographic approach, revealed different mechanisms of attachment. The physical elements that determine how individuals and the community relate to the context, how they use them as tools to overcome transience and how they affect individual and collective memory, can be defined by “scales of attachment” – urban scale (public), building scale (collective), and object scale (private). Therefore, I argue that meaningful objects, as repositories of memories, capable of being carried, represent the most important scale of attachment for a community still waiting, and wanting the next move.