What does a refugee camp teach us about making a commons? Let us think with the multigenerational refugee camps near the town of Dadaab, Kenya. Established in 1991 in lands crossing present-day Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, the Dadaab refugee camp complex has been one of the UNHCR’s largest and longest running establishments, currently engaged in a proposed process of integration into the Kenyan state. Kenya’s third largest grouping of people, after Nairobi and Mombasa, the Dadaab settlements have systematized architectural and planning practices carried out since, in international responses to crises elsewhere in the world.

Yet, looking closely at Dadaab, we find African ways of knowing. These are expressed in generations of migratory building and craft practices. Ancient understandings of the landscape and ecology. Historical particularities and a politics in oceanic, riverine, mountain, desert, plains, and urban relations. Song and oral traditions of sharing. Socialities and ways of living on land that supersede the proprietary. We acknowledge the elders and communities in Dadaab, whose lives and work hold meaning for us all.

Acknowledging the ecologies and aesthetics of a camp settlement and the land it occupies, the partitions and borders it reifies, the domesticities insurgent in the act of sheltering in emergency, and the sedentarizations embedded in interregional and international migration is part of our artistic and architectural embrace of Dadaab.