2025 Theses Master's

Spatial Confinement and the Architecture of Control: Analyzing Refugee Camps as Instruments of Border Management and Racialized Urban Exclusion

Mal, Nyadeng

Public imagination casts refugee camps as emergency shelter, philanthropic and humanitarian. However, recent scholarship reveals they are also instruments of governance. Due to the intensifying global unrest and climate change, refugee camps are growing across continents, particularly in Africa, enduring as both emblems and instruments of the contemporary migration regime. Refugee camps often seen as transient settlements offering immediate shelter have shaped into de facto permanent cities, challenging their foundational purpose and our understanding of camps as "temporary" humanitarian solutions. It is through architectural, planning and design practice alongside governing policies, that camps are able to closely manage people's existence, controlling movement, acting as gatekeepers of rights.

While there are many challenges to address in refugee and migration systems, it's important to note that this research is not a critique of independent humanitarian organizations providing essential and vital social services, nor the aid workers within the refugee camp. This research instead aims to interrogate the major governmental actors and the leadership that sits in distant offices directing the capture of migrants at sea, authorizing surveillance systems and biometric data collection, while simultaneously engaging in the global conflicts that cause the displacement.

Drawing on cases from camps and settlements across East Africa, urban biometric systems in Turkey and Greece, and EU externalization via North Africa, the analysis, grounded in necropolitics and elastic geography, shows how “closure” theatrics and budget reallocations generate leverage without delivering rights; how documents-as-infrastructure ration services and mobility; and how “self-reliance” without market access reproduces dependency. The result, a racialized urbanism of waiting in which “temporary” hardens into barriers to integration and mobility.

This thesis closes with a call to planners and architects to examine how their tools, standards, and briefs participate in the migration regime, and to redirect that expertise toward rights-bearing