Date

2018

Author

Kumaraslan, Dicle

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This thesis focuses on the ontology of refugee camps in order to ascertain the possible strategies derived from the architectural discourse, which aim at betterment in living conditions of those areas. As the result of the ontological inquiry that is deepened in the fields of finance and politics, the reality of refugee camps unfolds as the total exclusion from the global urban both physical and theoretical. Aforementioned exclusion is the result of the interstate neoliberal financial network whose operation capacity is exceeded over the conventional concept of the city that is consequently causing the limitless accumulation in the centers and the limitless exploitation of the periphery. From this point of view, the extent of the crisis oversteps the limits of scope of the architectural praxis. However, the tools of the architecture are not limited with the executable, practicable ones. Especially after the Modernism Movement in architecture, the representative tools of the architecture had also gained an important ground within the discourse. Within the scope of the thesis, with reference to Lefebvre who characterizes the urban as pure form and approaches the concept of utopia as an orientation, not as a destination, it is aimed to establish the possible-impossible conceptual framework of the utopia of reterritorialization, which can be an alternative to the tension between the center and periphery that is intrinsic to the system. The population of refugees, which is got stuck in between the mega cities (that inevitably centralize as the result of the capitalist urban practice) and the poor geographies (that are exploited until the total resource depletion), is still physically staying on a habitable planet. The argument of the study is that highlighting the uniqueness of the Earth in that manner is of vital importance within the architectural discourse. Because the only base and spatial provision of the somehow sustained life in refugee camps, which is politically and financially neglected, is the unequivocal linkage that set between the population and the land surface. Putting aside the tension between the center and periphery in the global urban, this thesis suggests to orient towards the earth as the conceptual center of reterritorialization and ends up with an open ended discussion about the possible acquisitions of this orientation. The mentioned discussion has two main focal points. First, if the refugee camps are reevaluated from this point of view, it conduces toward the inclusion of the various qualitative data to the spatial discussion: like the endemics, natural resources, biodiversity within the territories of refugee camps and the value of the aesthetical relationship that could be set between those and the refugees. Second, the recording of the refugee camps not only with the données of the social but also with the diversity of the bare biological life within architectural discourse has the potential to create the theoretical base for the actual possible strategies that project the creation of micro local economies or the organization of labor around the ground via spatial implementations.

Subject Keywords

Refugees., Architecture., Refugee camps., Refugees

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12622752/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/27663

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis