e-flux Architecture Positions 03/22 Left: Children and their families living in concrete water pipe sections, which sheltered an emergent Bangladesh in the Salt Lake refugee camps in Calcutta in 1971. From the permanent exhibition of the Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh (photo of exhibit: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, 2018). Right: Photograph of the urban material domesticities of concrete water pipe sections, infrastructural fragments repurposed by migrants to house themselves. From the 1986 Vistāra exhibition curated by Charles Correa. See Carmen Kagal ed., Vistāra: The Architecture of India (Bombay: The Festival of India, 1986). Within and beyond South Asia, refugees and refugee camps became constitutive elements of nation-state formation as well the production of statelessness. Structures such as concrete drain-pipe sections, eventually incorporated into a liberal modernist architectural discourse as representing an “un-celebrated” urban “ingenuity,” sheltered the future of emergent nations.9 Materially, the dispossessed, and not just modernist visions, shaped urbanism in South Asia. Between the censuses of 1941 and 1951, as partitions uprooted millions of people, the populations of the two capital cities, New Delhi and Karachi, tripled with the arrival of refugees, and the first formal urban planning endeavors of the new nation-states were undertaken as a consequence. Many non-Muslim refugees who arrived in Delhi from the devastations of Punjab settled in Kingsway Camp, a field of tents, textiles, and tin roofs. The Muslims of the city, displaced violently from their homes, sheltered in the shadow of Humayun’s Tomb, the Qutb Minar complex, and other historic Islamic architectural sites, shaping the materiality of a refugee occupation of the city and a logic that carried through the first post-Partition decades, as these first refugees were replaced by others in the shadow of the same monuments. This was demonstrated, for example, at the Purana Qila, which evolved from the humanitarian relief zone known as “Muslim Camp” to a Hindu- and Sikh-inhabited monument claimed to be the “violated” archaeological remnant of mythic Indraprashtha.10 Just as Delhi’s population swelled with refugees, so did Karachi’s, stoking anxiety and debates about how to house refugees in the midst of the old Hindu communities in a small sleepy port city unprepared for a national role. In 1953, the Karachi Development Authority was formed to address this housing crisis. In parallel, Delhi swallowed neighboring territory, which belonged to farmers and indigenous people. After nearly twenty settlements for housing societies were established, an Act of Parliament constituted the Delhi Development Authority in 1957. By the mid-1950s, Delhi had become an asymmetrical home to two million inhabitants, variously housed or unhoused—in private or public developments, government housing or slums, adaptations of the old walled city of Shahjahanabad, high- and low-rise apartments in medium density green environments, or camps-cum-squatter settlements.11 As the Pakistani state received international aid from the Ford Foundation and USAID in coping with refugees, and quickly thereafter adopted a Cold War alliance with the United States, its governments, including military dictatorships, received funding replete with architectural “assistance.” This design and development aid contoured the architecture and planning of many of its decolonizing cities and eviscerated the robust democratic politics promised by anticolonial struggles. The refugee resident of housing projects such as the planned Korangi Township in Karachi was a transitory figure upon whom were projected aspirations of the state and the international order—for structural sovereignty, political alignment, and economic development—vis-à-vis the architecture of housing. Yet, the shapeshifting of this liminal figure—identified as the citizen, yet not belonging, at once housable and evictable—enabled the spatial slippages and effacements necessary for continuous reproductions of structural power under authoritarianism. Of Karachi’s development schemes, housing plans of satellite sites such as Korangi, though few in number, have 04