Fragments of Home Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter

"Fragments of Home offers a highly original and timely account of all that shelter entails. In a wide-ranging study of varied efforts to provide refugee housing, Tom Scott-Smith shows how they collectively reflect the political and ethical ambiguities of displacement in built form. The result is comprehensive yet concise, at once incisive, engaging, and illuminating."
-Peter Redfield, University of Southern California "A brilliant, expansive, and original book about the nature of humanitarian shelter. Bringing together beautifully written ethnographic accounts of refugee shelter from France and Greece to Lebanon and Germany, this book is an unparalleled account of how to address basic human need. Even in times of emergency, not all shelter is equal; Scott-Smith takes emotion, dignity, aesthetics and politics seriously, and courageously argues for the principle of autonomy as the most important factor in creating a home. A must-read for those who want to both understand and improve today's world."
-Miriam Ticktin, CUNY Graduate Center "Beautifully written and based on meticulous ethnographic fieldwork, Fragments of Home is a must-read for anyone interested in humanitarianism. Through engaging case studies, the book offers an urgent and compelling critique of the often patriarchal design and delivery of basic shelter. Yet it is also solutions-oriented and practical, revealing that better outcomes are possible with greater respect for autonomy, and by offering displaced people greater control, even over seemingly simple design choices."
-Alexander Betts, University of Oxford "Engagingly written and based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Fragments of Home addresses an urgent global crisis: the need for emergency shelter for refugees.... Recommended."-Y. L. Espiritu, CHOICE "[Fragments of Home] is attentive to detail, drawing you into the story of each site, but each chapter is analyzed with a unique theoretical framework. The result is a fascinating book that is deeply engaging, and analytically powerful.... This is possibly one of the best books to be written on humanitarianism in some time and should be essential reading for those working on humanitarianism, architecture, housing, and migration studies."-Romola Sanyal, International Migration Review