Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara

The Sahrawi refugee camps, located in southern Algeria close to the border with the Western Sahara, give us an opportunity to question the predominant notions connected to refugee camps. This article builds up an urbanistic and architectural reading of these camps—established more than 35 years ago in the middle of the Sahara—and shows how these spaces have developed into a political project of the refugees. Instead of seeing the camps as a spatial manifestation of the state of exception, this article analyzes the Sahrawi camps through the everyday activities taking place there, showing their political and strategic dimensions. The camps, governed by the refugees themselves, not only allow for a process of social emancipation, but they also prefigure the state still denied them.