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From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara. Edited by Manuel Herz. Zürich: ETH Studio Basel and Lars Müller Publishers, 2013. Pp. 512; maps, photographs. $65.00/£45.00/euro50.00 cloth.
Until the past decade or so, those persons interested in acquiring detailed information concerning the Saharawi refugee camps located in southwestern Algeria had a rather difficult time outside of the few books on the subject. Written descriptions, mostly in specialist magazines, of the camps' character and their population tended to follow a set form, with a brief discussion of the origins of the Western Sahara conflict in the mid1970's, supplemented by a description of their self-governing nature and ostensible democracy. A short interview with either ordinary Saharawis or an official of the proindependence Polisario Front often rounded out the coverage. Visually, too, there was little to go by at first-black-and-white and color photographs of the camps up to the 1990's were relatively scarce, so much so that prospective visitors did not know fully what to expect. Then, having arrived in the camps, their functioning was sometimes opaque to the untutored Western eye, although if one observed them for even a short time, many signs of the Saharawis' organization and purposefulness were readily apparent.
But even after the advent of the Internet and the plethora of written words and visual images emanating from it, there still did not exist a comprehensive, book-length analysis of the camps either in English or (to the best of my knowledge) any other language. That gap has now been strikingly filled by the publication of From Camp to City, the product of a 2011 visit to the entire camp system by six architecture/urbanism students from the Swissbased ETH Studio Basel. A book that, after a brief survey of other refugee camps in Africa and elsewhere in the post-World War II period, takes note of the Saharawi camps' unique character: purely self-administered entities with only a very limited role by outsiders while at the same time remaining dependent on external humanitarian aid. In addition, the authors found evidence that the camps exhibit many classic...