This research focuses on displaced persons' production of habitat and rights to access urban resources in an historic district of an urban capital. After an earthquake in 2010, many NGOs and UN agencies provided minimally designed temporary shelters to people affected by the earthquake. However, many people refused to live in these hazardous camps and, instead, implemented housing solutions of their own. Moving in and around the old districts of the city, people started to negotiate their access to resources such as potable water or electricity and their right to use public space. Some displaced persons moved into unoccupied houses which are included on the World Monument Watch List. If they seem to be able to negotiate their right to stay in these houses, the stability of their settlements is threatened by new exclusionary spatial arrangements built by the many NGOs which established their base camps in this neighborhood. The main research question is: What are the imaginaries and aspirations embedded in the production of dwellings in these houses and, in turn, to what extent are these spatial practices shaped by a built environment echoing the colonial past, a brutal history of class conflicts and the omnipresence of humanitarian actors?
Using photography, interviews and participatory mapping, this research tracks the cultural practices of inhabitants through their use of built environments. This inquiry seeks to explore the transformation of the historical houses into dwellings to understand the vernacular basis for the production of rights and spaces of belonging. The use of elements of a material culture echoing the colonization, oppression of the masses warrants serious attention as it presents a popular response to disasters in which fruitful visions for the future arise. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this project will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.
Rose-Laure Jeanty, a 48 years old woman who works as a tailor and a cook, lost the small concrete house where she lived with her mother and her two children in downtown Port-au-Prince during the devastating 2010 earthquake. Jeanty explains: "We were cooking in the courtyard when it happened and, by miracle, nobody was harmed. We slept on the sidewalk for five days when my brother decided to move all of us in the old wooden house where he worked as a security guard before the proprietors moved to Florida ten years ago. The place was abandoned, in bad shape, but now, we take good care of it and it takes good care of us. I will never move from here unless I am forced to." Jeanty reestablished her tailoring business under the high-ceilinged timber house’s gallery and deems her new life to be "productive and more in accordance to [her] family needs". As a result of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, more than 230,000 people lost their lives and 65% of dwellings in the Port-au-Prince region were destroyed. Half a million people moved to tent camps and temporary shelters that were largely inadequate and hazardous. Many Haitians who refused to settle in tent camps and temporary shelters decided to use, transform and inhabit the ruins of the capital. In 2011, more than two thousand people moved to dwellings in disrepair in and around the historic districts where they can access potable water, electricity and street space for commercial activities. Between two and three hundred of these people, like Rose-Laure Jeanty, settled in some of the old wooden abandoned homes, known as the Gingerbread Houses, in downtown Port-au-Prince. These polychromatic and ornamented houses built at the beginning of the twentieth century were added to the World Monument Watch List (WMWL) in 2009 and stand as some the few remaining cultural landmarks of the capital. By specifically looking at the vernacular creation of dwellings in abandoned Gingerbread Houses, this study points to a peculiar material engagement with a form of patrimonial architecture that formerly stood as a marker of social distinction. Most of the Gingerbread Houses of Port-au-Prince, which were built for the Haitian elite and American occupants between 1890 and 1925, are today in a severe state of disrepair. The use of these patrimonial structures anchors displaced persons’ right to the city in a history of reformulation of social hierarchies, redistribution of land and resistance to foreign occupation. When talking about displaced persons, I refer to the recent effects of the disaster and to the history of rural migration that deeply shapes the demographic, economic and demographic urban centralization. I did fieldwork in provincial regions and studied housing practices and domestic work in small urban centers and villages where my informants were from. These spatial practices shape the use and re-consumption of deteriorated buildings that are national patrimony. This dynamic is not a mere occupation of empty shells by squatters but a process that underlies the production of emergent cultural meanings, politics and social relationships. The historic neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince are today the sites of top-down urban planning, demolitions, social tensions, contested meanings and, for the moment, vernacular reinventions of urban space. My work analyzes state-sponsored demolitions of residential neighborhoods, internationally funded housing projects, and NGO fragmentary urban development schemes that have contributed to Haitian experiences of instability and insecurity. Conversely, I focus on displaced persons’ right to the city conceived of as a practiced set of collective claims unfolding in daily life. The right to the city involves the "question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relationships we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold" (Harvey, 2012: 4). Investigating the construction of dwellings and neighborhoods gives insight into intimate conceptions of individual and collective selves and opens inquiries about the multiple social, ecological and cultural relations humans sustain to remake themselves. My work explores the imaginaries and aspirations embedded in the production of dwellings in the Gingerbread Houses and, in turn, analyzes to what extent these emergent spatial practices are shaped by a built environment echoing the colonial past, the United States occupation, a brutal history of class conflicts and the omnipresence of humanitarian actors. In order to address this problem, my dissertation attempts to answer two key questions about current tactics of work and dwelling: [A] In what way do the material demands of settling into and provisioning these homes connect with personal efforts to defend rights and claim opportunities amid the recovery efforts? [B] How does the patrimonial value of one’s home and neighborhood empower residents, widen their routes in the city and open economic opportunities in a place constantly rebuilt through top-down urban planning?
