This is a virtual space for keeping a track of news, events and other subjects relevant to this year’s theme.We are launching a Contingence Event Diary online as a parallel site, where to keep traces, tracks and as said: events. News, text by others, or our own feeds….this place will be an archive to be tool of the research that our encounters produces and to be able to look back or forward in time to come. We hope to add this with a relevant selection of issues and hopefully when our web gets finished and in place, you would find us stablished and well located too. Then you will be able to comment and interaction be easier.
Hopefully very soon !
eme3
Refugee crisis continues: It was a year ago but could have being yesterday's news
Refugee crisis in Mediterranean and surrounding area worsened this year. More and more refugees are trying to reach Europe from Africa, or from Middle East. And amount of refugees in camps is increasing as well. European politicians are discussing more how to solve this problem, many pages are informing every week about new story from Mediterranean.
Among stories about this issues last weeks two were exceptional. First is page about life in refugee camp.
Page, or project is called Refugee Republic is connection between interactive map, photos and video stories of people living in refugee camp. Project is about camp Domiz in Iraqi Kurdistan and it might change your point of view on people who left their homes because of war. Camp, in which there are over 60 000 refugees from Syria is slowly changing to a town.
In this town people are running their own business, children who attend school and even cabs making travelling inside easier. Visit the project
Tourist playground meets hectic refugee camp on Greek island
KOS, Greece (AP) — On this sunny Greek island accustomed to dealing with nothing more than a summer influx of tourists, authorities are struggling to handle a far different human tide: tens of thousands of migrants arriving in crammed rubber dinghies in hopes of making new lives in Europe.
Overwhelmed police clerks used fire extinguishers and batons on Tuesday to quell the crowds of weary and frustrated boat people fiercely jostling to be registered in Kos’ main port, where thousands have been sleeping rough for days waiting for temporary travel documents.
The migrants, mostly refugees from war-torn Syria, make their way across the narrow strait that separates Kos from Turkey in their hundreds every day — desperate men, women and children risking the sometimes fatal crossing in flimsy boats in the hope of gaining asylum in northern Europe.
What they ask of Greece is one piece of paper, which will record their refugee status.
“We just want to leave this island, and they don’t understand that,” said Laith Saleh, a 30-year-old former plasterer from Aleppo, who fled Syria last month after spending three years fighting Syrian government forces and Islamic State group extremists.
“We can’t get on the boat to Athens if we don’t have the papers.”
Her words came as a tough blow to the tens of thousands of Fort McMurray residents now scattered across the province.
Frustration among those stranded up north was growing, with some venting on social media sites, demanding answers.
One Twitter user posted a message saying: “NO ONE IS TELLING US ANYTHING!! We’re just sitting in a camp praying to get out!! Give us answers!!! Please.”
For some, such as Rula Labak, a refugee who fled Syria in 2011 and moved to Fort McMurray two months ago, the idea of rebuilding again is traumatising.
“My kids, mom say, ‘What [do] we have to do? You said to us we will live there, we will live happy. Why that happened to us?’” Labak told the Globe and Mail in halting English. “That’s very bad. I can’t answer to them anything.”
The family made it to Edmonton after fleeing a scene hauntingly reminiscent of the bombs that had rained down on their home near Damascus. When she and her family first arrived at a work camp that had been turned into an impromptu shelter, her two teenage children burst into tears as the rows of cots triggered their memories of refugee camps.
an old but very actual debate : The Global South is losing out .....
Faced with the scale of the challenge presented by the refugee crisis, a number of European countries have been asking themselves whether they should help the populations of developing countries or the tens of thousands of refugees that have been arriving in Europe in recent months.
In Sweden, where the government plans to take in 190,000 asylum seekers this year, the idea of siphoning off funds from the official development assistance budget is an attractive one.
The architectural community cannot remain apathetic to Calais' Jungle and the refugee crisis
After driving aimlessly through an industrial estate near the Calais channel tunnel in France, we stood in front of a nondescript gate outside a warehouse complex unsure if we were at the correct location.
Inside the gates we encountered a buzz of activity and there was music playing from somewhere. The energy was palpable and contagious. Dozens of volunteers were running about busy with various jobs. The initial appearance looked hectic and a bit chaotic but upon further observation the scene came into focus.
Every volunteer was clearly part of a team and each team was in charge of a specific task: one group was sorting through mounds of donated goods into perishable food items and non-food items, another team further sorted these piles into its designated storage area (duvets, jackets, shoes, etc). There were packers, loaders, cooks and drivers. An efficient hive of organised activities.
Surely we, as architects, must have something to say and offer
We were there to meet with Francois Guennoc, the secretary of L’Auberge des Migrants – a non-profit organisation dedicated to bringing humanitarian aid to the migrants of Calais. Francois was a gentle silver-haired man who welcomed us with open arms. He informed us that he had just returned to Calais after a month and half away at Lesbos assisting in the refugee camp.
Border
Laura Waddington’s Film, Borders, is a tool to look back at works and concerns that happened more than 20 years ago.
Its essential to bare this in mind when looking at the film.
We are also very interested in the notions of the firefly as symbol for resistance and how this days the movements are all connected in to our global exceptional situations.
In 2002, Laura Waddington spent months in the fields around Sangatte Red Cross camp, France with Afghan and Iraqi refugees, who were trying to cross the channel tunnel to England. Filmed at night with a small video camera, the figures lit only by the distant car headlights on the motorways, Border is a personal account of the refugees’ plight and the police violence that followed the camp’s closure.
France/ UK, 2004, 27 min. PAL, Colour, Stereo
Directed, Produced, Written, Camera, Edited: Laura Waddington
Co-produced: Love Streams Agnes b. Paris
Music: Simon Fisher Turner
Grand Prix Experimental-essai-art video, Cote Court, France 2005
First Prize Videoex 2005, Festival of Experimental Film and Video Zurich, Switzerland
Special Mention Ecumenical Jury, The 51st Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany 2005
Premiere: The 57th Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, 2004
Anne Hidalgo said that the exact location of the “humanitarian camp” would be revealed in the next few days after an inspection of possible sites.
Hundreds of migrants have been camping rough in the city.
Meanwhile, the death toll from migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean last week was revised upwards to 1,000.
International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo gave the new figure which comes after an estimate on Sunday of 700 deaths by the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.
The new camp in Paris is expected to provide both day facilities and overnight accommodation.
Decolonizing the Heart
“”While these altruistic images are central to the construction of “egology,” which sits atop the pyramidal construction of Man, it is primarily on its epistemological and ontological basis that I will focus my attention here. To properly understand, and to expose the “clay feet” of these false gods of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the religion of whiteness”
In his major work Ethics of Liberation (2013), Enrique Dussel’s “point of departure is a world system of globalized exclusion,” which can be placed against his imagining of what he calls “the Transmodern” i.e., to move beyond modernity to a pluraversality of existence. Similarly, according to Sylvia Wynter,
“The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which over-represents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.”
If so, then to move towards an actual theorization of the human, we must first shatter and expose the “overrepresentation of Man” as it has been molded into marble, bronze, and the psyche of peoples throughout the world as the normative construction of a universalized Western/white male being.
In imagining the human, the images that instantly come to mind are those of this overrepresentation, from global images of a supposed white/blue eyed Jesus, the anthropomorphic rendering of the elderly white bearded Christian God as painted in the Sistine Chapel creating Adam, Michelangelo’s David, statues of Christopher Columbus pointing West, Santa Claus and his rosy red cheeks, George Washington deified atop the rotunda in the United States capitol building, and today, that of the lifestyle branded white male celebrity jet setting across the planet to “save” children in Africa at one moment, then wearing the latest Giorgio Armani suit at his movie premier the next.
Research questions for a workshop around making a refugee Tent
“The ongoing crisis with refugees and people escaping from their countries due to war, climate disasters or mere socially engineered poverty, has created critical geopolitic situations. The use of the Tent to Camp and Occupy, has become a whole new area of study and has produced its own evolvement and tactics.
If Escuela de Calor, felt identified with exile, nomadism, and the hardships of dealing with the actual global mess, it is a a way of indicating a state of being of the world that points towards this. In constant crisis and increasing precariousness, in houses from which we can get expelled and made homeless in a second flat. Living o a speeding liquidity, evanescence and a haunting raising of global fascist tides.
We, from inside its walls, the apparently privileged europeans maybe not in such extreme conditions as all the refugees of this sad days, but never the less as the squizofrenia grows, all that like us, feel this pressure, feel this pain and want to feel useful and that our concerns are actually meet and can have enough agency for bearing a fruit that not only helps or assist, but that actually makes us more aware of how possible it is to create a problem solving collectivity.
How to make a Camp Tent for contingencies, can be technically approached? as a refuge made of any fabric usually made to camp, how this can become a tool of not only survival, but also for a kind of supported independent life if needed? We have done it, we have camped and protested, we had taken squares and we are ready to go out again and camp even if it has to be forever.”
Ebbing and Flowing: The EU’s Shifting Practices of (Non-) Assistance and Bordering in a Time of Crisis
The movements of illegalised migrants and the bordering of the Mediterranean Sea have seen momentous transformations since the beginning of the Arab uprisings in 2011.*1 The fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the Qaddafi regime in Libya have allowed migrants to at least temporarily re-open maritime routes which had been sealed off through the collaboration between the EU and North African states. The civil war that has engulfed Syria since 2012 has in turn led to the largest exodus since the Second World War While the majority of population movements unleashed by conflicts in the region have occurred on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, record numbers of people have sought to reach the EU by boat, and equally unprecedented numbers of deaths at sea have been recorded – 3,195 in 2014 and 3,772 in 2015 according to IOM data.2 This intense and rapidly evolving movement of people across the sea but also on the EU’s firm land, where migrants have collectively overcome every single barrier that states have erected in front of them, has been labelled a “migration crisis.” This designation, in return, has enabled the deployment of exceptional military, humanitarian and political “solutions” (see “Keywords” in this issue). At sea we have witnessed a multiplication of actors involved in bordering and rescue practices. Border and Coast Guards have been joined by national and multinational military operations, civilian rescue missions and commercial ships and we have seen repeated shifts in their missions, operational logics, and institutional assemblages. On land, developments have been no less impressive. States have been desperately running behind migrants’ turbulent movements and re-erecting border controls between EU member-states and at the EU’s periphery. These newly staged bordering practices echo the changes to the EU’s political and economic geography in the aftermath of the EU’s “debt crisis” and the increasing polarisation between southern and northern European member-states. Rather than a “migration crisis,” then, we will argue that we are witnessing the crisis of the current EU border regime.
UK plans to strengthen defences against migrants arriving by sea
in the picture: A makeshift camp along the cliffs near the port of Dieppe, northern France, from where a group of about 150 Albanians want to try to cross the Channel to the UK. Photograph: Michel Spingler/AP
Posing as controllers of borders and keeper of our safety this is how UK deals with the massive crisis we are all involved with. Including all the poverty they and their collaborations in foreign policy for decades has help to bring out.
The government plans to increase collaboration between the UK Border Force and the Royal Navy in order to strengthen defences against migrants crossing illegally by sea into the UK, the Home Office has confirmed.
The Border Force has just three vessels operating at any one time in the seas off Britain, but the government intends to enhance joint working between law enforcement agencies and the navy to increase patrolling in territorial waters as part of a long-held plan.
In a dusty expanse of desert in eastern Kenya sits the world’s largest refugee settlement, the place I call home.
The camp was set up in 1991 to house Somalis fleeing the civil war. At first, there were three settlements: Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera. Ifo II and Kambioos were later added. They are all generally called Dadaab, named after the nearby town 50 miles (80km) from the Somali border.
Half a million people are estimated to live here. My family are among them. They arrived in Ifo in the early 1990s; I was born in 1996.
I grew up and completed high school here in 2014, and I hope to start university soon. I’ve been writing since I was a child and I am hoping to become a journalist. My two younger siblings, also born in Ifo, are at primary school.
Dadaab is our home, but in May, the Kenyan government said it would dismantle the camp by November, claiming that it had been infiltrated by militant groups.
It was not the first such threat. In 2012, closing the camp was mooted due to “economic concerns”, and last year, the Kenyan deputy president, William Ruto, said Dadaab would be shut within three months, although this never happened.
From the attack on the Westgate shopping mall to the slaughter at GarissaUniversity College, the Kenyan government has long blamed Somali refugees for insecurity, but for people in the camp, the most recent announcement feels like the most serious yet. The government disbanded the department for refugee affairs and politicians are keen to appear in control of national security, with a presidential election coming up next year.
It is true that security has become an issue here. There is one main dusty road that runs through Ifo. I used to go there as a child to watch the cars drive past at exactly 8am, every day, etched with UN letters, carrying workers to their field offices. Today, it is almost dormant.
Two Spanish aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were kidnapped in October 2011 and there have been multiple explosions over the years. Cars no longer move without a heavy security escort or following a predicable schedule.
Other things have also changed. The playground where I played football is now occupied by people living in tents. The narrow path I walked to school is a graveyard and the hospital I attended as a child lies in ruins.
practical self enquire
“The ongoing crisis with refugees and people escaping from their countries due to war, climate disasters or mere socially engineered poverty, has created critical geopolitic situations. The use of the Tent to Camp and Occupy, has become a whole new area of study and has produced its own evolvement and tactics.
If Escuela de Calor, felt identified with exile, nomadism, and the hardships of dealing with the actual global mess, it is a a way of indicating a state of being of the world that points towards this. In constant crisis and increasing precariousness, in houses from which we can get expelled and made homeless in a second flat. Living o a speeding liquidity, evanescence and a haunting raising of global fascist tides.
We, from inside its walls, the apparently privileged europeans maybe not in such extreme conditions as all the refugees of this sad days, but never the less as the squizofrenia grows, all that like us, feel this pressure, feel this pain and want to feel useful and that our concerns are actually meet and can have enough agency for bearing a fruit that not only helps or assist, but that actually makes us more aware of how possible it is to create a problem solving collectivity.
How to make a Camp Tent for contingencies, can be technically approached? as a refuge made of any fabric usually made to camp, how this can become a tool of not only survival, but also for a kind of supported independent life if needed? We have done it, we have camped and protested, we had taken squares and we are ready to go out again and camp even if it has to be forever.”
Escuela de Calor, Summer Camp, Eme3 On Jul-2015.
Child refugees at Calais plunged into despair by plan to close camp
Charities claim that self-harm and mental health problems have soared and attack Home Office’s failure to rehouse children
image:Idrissa, 17, from Sudan has been in the camp since February. Photograph: Mark Townsend/for the Observer
@townsendmark
Incidents of self-harm and depression among children in the Calais refugee camp are increasing as the mental health of unaccompanied minors deteriorates in advance of the site’s demolition. Charities, volunteers and aid agencies say they were witnessing psychological collapse among many of the site’s child refugees after President François Hollande confirmed last week that the camp would be shut down.
One senior official from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned that some child refugees had threatened to harm themselves if the camp was destroyed. Aid workers also said other unaccompanied minors, many of whom are eligible to claim asylum in the UK, had talked about killing themselves, such was their despair over the camp’s future.
Abdul Afzali, who works for the charity Refugee Youth Service and looks after unaccompanied minors inside the Calais camp, said: “Some are burning themselves with cigarettes, one arm, then the other. Others have told me that they want to jump in front of a lorry and give up. Unfortunately, most have developed serious depression.”
more here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/01/child-refugees-despair-calais-camp-close
‘It is a disgrace to Europe’: former child refugee Lord Dubs on the Calais camp
Four months ago, after an intervention by the Kindertransport veteran, Britain promised to rescue hundreds of children stranded without parents in the squalor of the Calais refugee camp. They are still there – and are losing hope.
After two hours walking through the camp in Calais, meeting refugee children who have crossed Europe alone, Alf Dubs is exhausted and feeling uncharacteristically despondent. “It is awful. I will have nightmares, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he says.
Lord Dubs, the Labour peer who earlier this year masterminded a political coup forcing the government to promise to give sanctuary to some unaccompanied child refugees, usually comes across as an upbeat figure, not inclined to wallow in despair. Today he seems momentarily overwhelmed by the horrific situation facing about 860 children living here in second-hand camping tents and flimsy wooden shacks. Given the amount of energy he has dedicated to trying to help them, and the complete absence of any progress to date, he has every reason to feel depressed.
“It is a disgrace. A piece of legislation was passed with enormous public support, and the government has done nothing discernible about it,” he says. As a former child refugee himself, brought to Britain from Czechoslovakia on one of the Kindertransport trains in 1939, his sense of anger at the political inaction is particularly acute.
After his intervention shamed Cameron’s government into a U-turn, securing a commitment that Britain would give homes to some of the estimated 88,000 child refugees believed to be travelling through Europe, his amendment to the Immigration Act was widely celebrated as a rare sign of the government’s humanity. Four months later, none of the qualifying children have arrived in the UK. Worse still, Dubs is dismayed to find, during a meeting with French officials, that there is no system in place for identifying and registering the children in order to see who might be eligible.
Extreme Contingence and how critical is becoming: Calais: refugee children 'sleeping rough' after camp demolition
Images have emerged showing refugees and migrants sleeping rough following the clearing of the Calais camps, amid claims from charities that dozens of unaccompanied children are among those without shelter.
The 78-year-old architect, who was appointed an Italian senator for life in 2013, has worked with Unesco and also had experience in high-risk quake zones in Japan and California. He said it was possible to make buildings safe with a “subtle scientific” approach which he likened to modern medical diagnosis. However, he said he recognised that corruption was a perennial obstacle in Italy.
“It is not just corruption, there is bureaucracy and illegality,” Piano said. “Now there is a strong push against it and Italy is trying to do something about it. It is not impossible to overcome it, something new is coming.”
The government also plans to appoint former Emilia Romagna governor Vasco Errani as special commissioner to oversee post-quake reconstruction. He had a similar position in 2012 after two earthquakes in Emilia Romagna left 27 dead and thousands homeless.
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