Design as Infrastructure

Abstract

Chapter Five, “Design as Infrastructure,” zooms in on the Dadaab camps' component architectures, authored ‘works’ by major relief organizations as well as refugees in Dadaab: the tarps, tents, and other structures whose design histories chart the material intersections between the camp and the world. The chapter begins and ends with collectives of women whose labor, organization, design collaborations, and building have lent form and infrastructure to Dadaab. Juxtaposing these spatial practices and mobile architectures gives a textured picture of Dadaab, in which design—as noun and verb—assumes the role of urgent, lifesaving, and authored infrastructure. Putting refugees' localized work into conversation with the global work of organizations through iconography, signature practices, and the objects' social lives raises questions about the commodification of aid and paradoxical collaborations in which the material practices of humanitarian relief underlie a contradictory liberal discourse.