Introduction

Refugee camps are paradigmatic sites where humanitarianism, architecture, and politics converge around the management of displaced populations. Emerging historically from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as provisional encampments for victims of war, famine, and persecution, these spaces have evolved into enduring infrastructures of exception. The genealogy of the refugee camp is inseparable from the consolidation of the modern nation-state and its biopolitical mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The 1951 Geneva Convention legally defined the refugee as a person outside their country of nationality and unable or unwilling to avail themselves of its protection. Yet, this juridical definition is insufficient to encompass the broader landscape of displacement—internally displaced persons, stateless individuals, and migrants who inhabit camps, informal settlements, and peri-urban zones of precarious existence. These spaces articulate what Giorgio Agamben terms the state of exception: zones where the rule of law is suspended, yet where governance and care operate through humanitarian logics.

Architecture occupies a central position in this phenomenon, functioning as both the material and conceptual apparatus of humanitarian control. From the modular tent of the UNHCR to the grid-based layout of camps such as Zaatari in Jordan, the architectural rationality of the camp embodies an ambivalent dialectic of care and containment. Humanitarian architecture translates the moral imperative of saving lives into spatial typologies that regulate visibility, mobility, and temporality. Camps are thus laboratories of architectural experimentation under conditions of crisis but also sites where the politics of temporariness are inscribed in the built environment. The spatialization of aid, logistics, and surveillance transforms architecture into a technology of governance—a “humanitarian dispositif” that mediates between emergency relief and long-term urbanization. Informal architectures that arise within or adjacent to camps, such as self-built shelters, marketplaces, and communal infrastructures, further reveal the agency of displaced populations in reconfiguring imposed spatial orders.

In the digital age, technologies of representation and mediation have reconfigured both the perception and management of displacement. Satellite imagery, GIS mapping, and biometric registration systems are integral to the humanitarian apparatus, producing what anthropologist Didier Fassin describes as the “humanitarian reason” of contemporary governance. At the same time, social media platforms function as spaces of visibility, advocacy, and self- representation, where refugees document their trajectories and contest their erasure from official narratives. Digital infrastructures also shape the affective economies of humanitarianism, circulating images of suffering that mobilize empathy while reinforcing asymmetries of spectatorship and power.

Video games and virtual environments extend these dynamics into the realm of simulation. Projects such as Syrian Journey by the BBC or Refugee Republic render the experience of displacement interactive, transforming humanitarian crises into objects of digital consumption and pedagogical engagement. These gamified representations, while potentially fostering empathy, also participate in the commodification of humanitarian imaginaries. Thus, refugee camps and their digital counterparts form a continuum of mediated architectures—spatial, virtual, and affective—through which displacement is visualized, managed, and contested. In this sense, the refugee camp is not merely a physical settlement but a globalized socio-technical construct that articulates the politics of mobility, humanitarianism, and digital mediation in the twenty-first century.

Research Streams

The Camps group works on strategies of re-mapping and critical cartography, focusing on the development of an app capable of automatically carrying out both processes in informal settlements to support their improvement and redesign spaces such as camps. The tool is designed for humanitarian professionals as well as community leaders, empowering them during and after humanitarian emergencies. It addresses common challenges such as limited time and resources, which often hinder proper planning and, in some cases, legalization processes. To date, two workshops have been conducted—in Bukavu, DRC, and La Guajira, Colombia—which have served to test the tool’s relevance and workflow and collect data for its ongoing development.

1. Points of Home – Mapping Emergency and Self-Built Displaced Settlements

– Javier Fernández Contreras, Rachel Howell, Aida Navarro Redón, Damien Greder.

A HUD project developed in collaboration between HEAD–Genève and EssentialTech at EPFL. This project aims to develop a mobile application that transforms any smartphone into a powerful tool for documenting and rethinking both interior and exterior spaces, especially those built in the midst of humanitarian crises. By using the device’s camera, the app will allow users to record simple videos of their environments. These videos will then be processed into 3D point cloud models through Gaussian splatting techniques (3DGS). From these 3D reconstructions, the app will automatically generate 2D plans of the captured spaces, providing a vital resource for communities that often lack official documentation of their homes and settlements.

The core goal of the project is to offer populations living in contexts of displacement or crisis a means to reclaim, rethink, and potentially legalize their spaces. For informal settlements and vulnerable communities, having accurate, accessible, and self-generated spatial documentation can be a transformative step toward recognition and improved living conditions. At the same time, the app will serve as a valuable tool for international organizations and humanitarian workers, providing reliable, user-friendly documentation to support interventions on the ground, including the accurate planning of camps, for example.

While certain tools currently exist to perform parts of this process, none provide a simplified, end-to-end workflow accessible to non-experts. This app is conceived as an integrated solution: intuitive, lightweight, and adapted to diverse local realities.

In a second development phase, the project envisions linking the 3D models with local and legal databases of construction materials, standards, and techniques. This will enrich the models with practical information and provide tailored recommendations to improve housing quality and overall habitability.

Ultimately, the app combines cutting-edge technology with a socially driven mission: empowering vulnerable populations and humanitarian actors with the tools they need to map, understand, and strengthen the spaces they call home.

1.1 Analyzing and Rethinking Brisas del Norte: Exploration and Study of an Informal Settlement Through Virtual Tools and Digital Co-Design. Colombia, September (1st–13th), 2025, in collaboration with the Universidad de La Guajira. 

– Javier Fernández Contreras, Aida Navarro Redón, Damien Greder,

The community of Brisas del Norte was established in 2014, composed mainly of a Venezuelan–Colombian population. Despite its demographic stability, approximately 80% of its inhabitants had acquired Colombian nationality, while around 20% remained exclusively Venezuelan. The total population reached 1,340 people, organized into 318 families, with an active group of 24 leaders—both women and men—who played a key role in community management and neighborhood development. In addition, most of the population had returned to Colombia, as they had previously migrated to Venezuela as victims of the armed conflict, mainly from the departments of Bolívar, Antioquia, and Chocó. Brisas del Norte belonged to Comuna 4 of Riohacha, which consisted of 23 consolidated neighborhoods and 5 neighborhoods in process, reflecting a diverse urban fabric with varying levels of infrastructure and access to basic services.

This community constituted a unique setting where diverse personal histories intertwined with local challenges and were framed within a broader context, alongside other informal settlements in La Guajira. This three-phase collaboration between the University of La Guajira and the research project The Future of Humanitarian Design, through HEAD–Genève, opened a line of study that sought to analyze Brisas del Norte from an architectural perspective and through a participatory process. The objective was to work with design processes that allowed the development of useful prototypes to improve and rethink this settlement, with the possibility of extrapolating the results to other informal settlements. To this end, the workshop proposed the use of virtual models as tools for point cloud modeling and interactive software, employing an innovative methodology that combined social construction with virtual-material practices. Through spatial analysis and digital modeling, university students developed innovative strategies around access to water, nighttime urban safety, and waste management, applying a multidisciplinary approach.

1.2 Learning from Bukavu. Rwanda, July (2nd–9th), 2025, in collaboration with the Catholic University of Bukavu

– Javier Fernández Contreras, Aida Navarro Redón, Damien Greder

This workshop, conducted with architecture students from UCB, aimed to establish urban narratives and sensitive cartographies capable of expressing the development challenges of the city of Bukavu. Using their mobile phones, the students collected data from different points around Bukavu. This ordinary object saw its data-collecting capacity diverted—a form of hacking that enabled users to learn from their environment, collect fragments of it, and reimagine it. The workshop provided an opportunity to reconsider this data, to subvert it into graphic material that allowed for a rethinking of these spaces. It was a reappropriation of mapping practices, starting from the small scale, from the population and its issues, in order to give them the possibility of planning or designing alternative solutions.

The methodology followed in the workshop focused on urbanity by starting from its situated and emerging manifestations in specific contexts while also being able to reflect broader issues. An assemblage of methods allowed for detailing a reality generated in daily life—from logics of self-construction, to the layering of invisible strata, to relationships between populations and with the non-human. Recent advances in three-dimensional representation complemented photographs and sound recordings. Generated from simple videos, point clouds (PoCs) made it possible to account for elements generally absent from architectural representations: daily appropriations, informal economic exchanges, the integration of displaced populations into the urban fabric, and self-construction—all made invisible by traditional representational methods.

Over the course of a week, the UCB architecture students experimented with various methods of observation, assemblage, and digital representation in order to establish sensitive and critical cartographies that presented the shared urban environment as a succession of constantly interrelated narratives.

2. Camps, Refugees and Video Games

– Javier Fernández Contreras, Aida Navarro Redón

Video games and armed conflicts have been intertwined since the very origins of digital computing. It is no coincidence that the first efforts to program a machine to play a game—most notably by Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, who collaborated closely on Allied intelligence projects during World War II—emerged directly from wartime technological developments and were later published in 1950 and 1952 under the title Programming a Computer to Play Chess.

Similarly, in 1958, William Higginbotham, a physicist involved in the development of the atomic bomb, created Tennis for Two, one of the earliest known video games. This deep entanglement between the production of militarized knowledge and the birth of video games has persisted: by the late 1990s, the U.S. military was openly using video games as recruitment tools. Yet this relationship extends beyond technological innovation and military training to include the spaces of humanitarian crises that followed the war, particularly refugee camps.

While video games featuring armed combat—particularly First-Person Shooters (FPS) and Third-Person Shooters (TPS)—continue to dominate the industry, their portrayal of conflict is often narrow, typically emphasizing battlefield heroics while largely overlooking the global repercussions of war, namely mass displacement, refugee encampments, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Only a small fraction of war-themed games engages with the lived realities of refugees or depicts camps as significant virtual spaces. This academic research aims to explore these overlooked narratives, focusing on how refugee camps—emerging as a massive and enduring phenomenon in the post-WWII world—have been represented in video games across history. By analyzing games that engage with the experiences of displacement, encampment, and survival, we will investigate how digital media constructs, distorts, or erases these crucial aspects of modern conflict.

3. Humanitarianism, Architecture, and Social Media

– Javier Fernández Contreras, Damie Greder

In 1855, Roger Fenton, widely considered the first war photographer, covered the Crimean War for four months. Constrained by the technical limitations of the medium, his images were staged independently, with an exposure time of fifteen seconds each. Today, civilians can livestream the daily impact of war, conflicts, and humanitarian crises. Pictures are created not only by external journalists but also directly by those involved. Equipped with a smartphone and internet access, victims gain the additional status of reporters.

Social media is transforming the public’s relationship with humanitarianism in two opposing but complementary ways. First, it does so through the standardization of global attention, as crises in local geographies are consumed globally through posts with similar imagery. Second, it relocates architecture as a place of situated asymmetries, displaying spatial tectonics as props in constructing power, violence, resistance, or emancipation. In both cases, mobile phones foster mediated empathy by bringing viewers closer to the embodied experiences of victims. Unlike external reporters, civilians use smartphones to create real-time images and videos. This shift emphasizes bodies in space as expressions of suffering, relief, or resilience, where architecture is neither neutral nor uninvolved. At the same time, algorithms act as gatekeepers, often operating as black boxes that can trigger new biases, such as diffusing a single, normalized narrative of conflicts.

The change brought about by digital imagery in the history of humanitarianism parallels previous paradigm shifts, from Robert Capa’s frontline photography during the Spanish Civil War to American televised portrayals of the Vietnam War, and more recently, the use of social media in the 2023 Gaza War. As CNN reported in January 2024, “Palestinians are documenting the war for millions on social media. Their followers have come to see them as family.” The fact that news feeds have recently seen a surge in conflict-related content highlights the role of online social networks in shaping public perceptions of humanitarianism, which now appears alongside personal content—from friends’ photos to influencers’ posts. Analyzing various sites of violence, conflict, and displacement—ranging from Ukraine and South Sudan to the Darién Gap and Bangladesh—and considering diverse perspectives, from international reporters and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to local organizations and individuals (often victims), reveals how social media is transforming contemporary perceptions of humanitarianism and architecture.

4. Political Housing: Together*less – PhD Research

– Damien Greder

The dissertation Political Housing: Together*less* explores the potential materialization of sufficiency practices within collective housing. The research is based upon two empirical investigations. A first part, an atlas of existing and known projects within housing and architectural history, offers a novel collection and outlook through the lens of sufficiency. A second part, with four in-depth cases, examines alternative typologies capable of broadening the classical notion of collective housing. While the atlas encompasses designed cases, the in-depth studies on inhabitant-built environments shift emphasis from the planned to the lived, modified, and adapted over time. These two orientations complement each other; the housing produced through different modes of emergence may also reveal nuances or contradictions.

The atlas and the in-depth cases are analyzed around four aspects related to sufficiency identified from the literature review: affordability, commoning, circularity, and entanglement with the more-than-human.

5. Bourgeons d’exil: Co-developing a social impact video game about the migratory experience seen through the lens of motherhood.

– Aida Navarro Redón.

A HUD project developed as a collaboration between HEAD–Geneva, HEdS, and the ICRC. The project employs the video game medium to co-construct a narrative and aesthetic experience that seeks to promote compassion and evoke positive emotions around the challenges of migration experienced through motherhood (for example, leaving one’s home, separating from loved ones, crossing borders, giving birth/caring for a newborn, creating new bonds).

The aim is to transpose, into the field of socially impactful video games, the emotions linked to these journeys in a perinatal context, in connection with research issues on well-being and mental health (trauma, attachment, postpartum in migratory situations). Its realization will be supported in two phases: one of data collection through direct testimonies of migrant women thanks to the collaboration with the ICRC, and another of transforming these narratives into parts of the mechanics of a video game system that can serve as a voice for these stories.

Publications

Greder, Damien. “PhD Visuals and Method: Revealing the Hidden Life of Places.” METEORE Journal, no. 17 (October 13, 2025). Genève, Switzerland.

Fernández Contreras, Javier, and Damien Greder. “Architecture, Humanitarianism, and Social Media.” In Humanitarianism, edited by Jonathan Luke Austin, Nick Axel, Javier Fernández Contreras, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Anna Leander. e-flux Architecture, November 2025. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/humanitarianism/6782978/architecture-humanitarianism-and-social-media

Events

7th Bernardo Secchi Working Seminar
EPFL-ENAC, Switzerland — 28–29 October 2024
Presentation: “Can Nature Be Seen?”
Panel: Alternative Representations

10th International Conference on Communication & Media Studies
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France — 11–12 September 2025
Presentation: “Architecture, Humanitarianism and Social Media”
Panel: Media Technologies
Authors: Javier Fernández Contreras and Damien Greder

ELIA Leadership Symposium 2025: The Power of Many
Geneva, Switzerland — 16 October 2025
Presentation: “The Role of the Arts and Design in Building Dialogue and Fostering Humanitarian Action”
Authors: Javier F. Contreras and Pascal Hufschmid

Learning from Bukavu
University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium — 19 November 2025
Presentation: “Learning from Bukavu”
Authors: Javier F. Contreras, Aida Navarro, and Damien Greder

Research Day 2025: Hors Catégorie
Flanders Architecture Institute, Antwerp, Belgium — 20 November 2025
Presentation: “Screens Within Screens: The Architecture of Social Media”
Author: Javier F. Contreras

21st International Conference on Architectural Graphic Expression
Barcelona, Spain — 2026
Panel: …in Teaching and Learning
Presentation: “Learning from Bukavu: Humanitarian Drawing in an Unplanned City”
Authors: Aida Navarro Redón, Damien Greder, Javier F. Contreras, and Dag Boutsen