THE SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP IN LEBANON: REGULATED AND UNREGULATED SPACES OF A HETEROTOPIA AND THEIR SOCIO-CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
TU KAISERSLAUTERN
2017
A refugee camp as a space of constituted visibility: Shatila. Built in 1949 for displaced persons from the northern Palestinian territories, located in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut, the site of a genocide in the 1980s and, in the Syrian crisis, a symbol of national and international socio-political failure, it visualises the actual but also mental struggle of the inhabitants with the imposed and limited sphere. The territorial, political and social limitations of the (now not only) Palestinian population in Beirut lead to the basic idea of critical spatial research: the microcosm of the camp is perceived as a fragile but constant state of emergency and serves as an object of investigation in order to place social and cultural processes in discursive spatial relationships. The basis of the investigation is the 'new cultural geography' strongly influenced by Foucault and its second phase of turning towards visibility and re-materialisation. A blurring of structures and Cartesian grids is then permitted in order to translate geographical space into different systems that utilise differentiated scientific approaches in order to ultimately generate individual and collective conclusions about the meaning of space in a geography of crisis.
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