When Temporary Architecture Lasts for Generations

Reflections on the Architecture for Humanity Program and Palestinian Refugee Camps by Nawar Dakkak

During the Architecture for Humanity program at Yacademy, we spent weeks discussing emergencies.

We spoke about climate change, migration, conflict, housing shortages, and humanitarian crises. We studied projects that responded to difficult conditions with limited resources. We learned from architects who challenged the idea that beauty belongs only to places of stability and prosperity. Again and again, one idea returned: architecture has the responsibility to provide dignity, even in the most difficult circumstances.

As architects, we often approach humanitarian crises through the idea of shelter. How can it be built quickly? How can it be affordable? How can it protect people from rain, heat, wind, or cold?

These are important questions.

Yet throughout the course, I found myself thinking about a different one:

What happens when the emergency does not end?

As a Palestinian architect from Jerusalem, I grew up aware of a reality that challenges many assumptions about temporary architecture. Some of the world's oldest refugee camps were established as emergency responses more than seventy years ago. What were once tents intended to last a few months gradually became neighborhoods, then urban districts, and eventually entire communities spanning multiple generations.

The first time I visited a refugee camp as an architecture student, what struck me was not the density or the infrastructure. It was the evidence of everyday life.

The roofs.

Water tanks sat beside satellite dishes. Laundry lines stretched between walls. Additional rooms appeared where families had expanded their homes over time. Unfinished columns projected upward, waiting for a future floor that might one day be built. Every surface seemed to tell a story of adaptation.

Nothing felt temporary.

Yet everything had begun as temporary.

This realization stayed with me throughout the Architecture for Humanity course. Many of the lectures explored how architecture can respond to emergency conditions, but they also emphasized something equally important: people are not passive recipients of architecture. Communities continuously shape, transform, and reinterpret the spaces they inhabit.

In Palestinian refugee camps, this process is visible everywhere.

A narrow alley becomes a playground.

A staircase becomes a meeting place.

A small courtyard becomes a shared living room.

A rooftop becomes an extension of the home.

Architecture evolves through daily life.

The camp, despite its difficult origins, becomes a record of collective resilience.

This perspective influenced the way I approached my final project for the course, a community pavilion designed for displacement contexts in Somalia.

At the beginning of the design process, I was focused on the structure itself: materials, climate responsiveness, construction methods, and environmental performance. Inspired by vernacular building traditions, the pavilion used woven straw, timber elements, rope connections, and earth-based materials that could be sourced and assembled locally.

But as the project developed, I became less interested in the building as an object and more interested in what might happen around it.

Could it become a place where children learn?

Could it host conversations, celebrations, and community meetings?

Could it support the routines that make people feel connected to one another?

In other words, could it become more than a shelter?

Looking back, I realize that this question emerged directly from my own experience and from the lessons of the course itself.

Humanitarian architecture is often evaluated according to speed, efficiency, and technical performance. These criteria are essential, especially during moments of crisis. Yet refugee camps reveal another dimension of architecture that is rarely discussed.

People need more than protection.

They need places where life can continue.

The success of a shelter cannot be measured only by how quickly it is built. It should also be measured by whether people can gather, maintain relationships, preserve traditions, and create a sense of belonging.

This is perhaps what I found most meaningful in the Architecture for Humanity program. Beyond construction techniques and design strategies, the course encouraged us to think about architecture as a social act. Architecture is not only about solving problems. It is about understanding people.

For me, Palestinian refugee camps embody this lesson in a powerful way.

They are not examples of ideal urban planning, nor should they be romanticized. They emerged from displacement, uncertainty, and unresolved histories. Yet they demonstrate something remarkable about human beings: our ability to transform spaces of survival into spaces of life.

Over time, residents transformed temporary shelters into homes, pathways into streets, and fragmented spaces into communities.

Architecture alone cannot resolve humanitarian crises.

It cannot end displacement or erase loss.

But architecture can create the conditions through which dignity survives.

As I completed the Architecture for Humanity program, this became my most important takeaway. Humanitarian design is not only about responding to emergencies. It is about recognizing that even in situations of uncertainty, people continue to dream, gather, celebrate, learn, and build relationships.

The challenge for architects is not simply to design shelters.

It is to design for the life that follows.