Canvas cities: Does the world need a new model for refugee camps?
To find the movie theater in this sprawling camp for people fleeing war, take a right at the main gate, past the knot of police in full riot gear stealing bored glances at their cellphones. Go right again at the sentry tower made of shipping containers stacked up like a giant Jenga game, and then once more just past the water tap.
There, the road opens into a wide, dusty boulevard lined with tented shops. The movie theater is a few shops in, wedged between a tea stall, a vegetable market, and a large furniture store.
As far as cinemas go, it’s a bit cramped and more than a bit overheated, but what it lacks in facilities it makes up for with the omnivorous taste of its proprietor. Some days he screens a double feature of American professional wrestling and a Hollywood horror flick. Others it’s syrupy romances or wobbly livestreams of British soccer matches. Today, the movie is “Saving Private Ryan” cranked to a volume so loud the whole tent vibrates.
Four years ago, this area with the cinema and the entire tent city that surrounds it was nothing but an empty field backing up against a United Nations base on the edge of South Sudan’s capital city.
Then came civil war: a power struggle between the president and his deputy turned suddenly bloody. In the span of a single week in December 2013, about 30,000 people showed up on the UN’s doorstep here, begging for protection. Eventually, more than 200,000 people would take refuge in UN compounds countrywide.
At first the agency guessed that the new arrivals wouldn’t stay long – a few days, maybe a week or two, just until the fighting fizzled. But as the conflict deepened, the UN and international humanitarian groups found themselves in a familiar mode: plotting the architecture of a settlement for people with nowhere to go.
