 Hello everyone, welcome. So my name is Lucy Earle, I'm the director of the Human Settlements Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development here in London, IED. Human Settlements is a bit of an old fashioned term where I basically head up a group of urban researchers. So we're urbanists working with federations of the urban poor in cities in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. On issues of urbanization, urban poverty, climate change, resilience, housing and displacement, or forced displacement, which is what we're going to talk about today. Talking about refugees in cities of, for one to the better term, the global south. I'm joined here by Kate Crawford, who is an engineer currently working on sustainability in the built environment for a company called KLH Sustainability. So she's a civil engineer by training, she has a PhD from UCL in Sustainable Infrastructure, but she's had many jobs, including driving a tank. She can also strip a bicycle and put it back together again. She's a great talent. But she has also worked in humanitarian response and has worked in the Middle East and specifically in Jordan, which we're going to be talking about today. Also, someone who's worked on the Middle East is Romela Sanyal, who is Associate Professor in Geography and Planning at the London School of Economics and Political Science. So Romela works on similar themes to me on urban displacement, working with urban refugees and other displaced people in the Middle East, India and Europe. And she has a wonderful podcast called Displacement Urbanisms. So as well as being extremely accomplished women, both Kate and Romela are my friends, so there will be a relaxed atmosphere in our chat. This is not a formal panel. I thought I should just explain that. So before, I think I should probably launch in just to explain that I'm going to talk for about 10, 15 minutes, probably a bit less on some work that is related to a project funded by the British Academy. I'm then going to hand over to Kate, who will give a more technical presentation. And then Romela is going to challenge us with some answers to some pertinent questions. So you don't have to shout out, but what you see in your mind's eye when I start talking about refugees or when you hear about refugees. So given the situation in the UK at the moment, the political situation, the news, you're probably thinking of something like this. So you're probably thinking about people coming across the channel in boats, or if you cast your mind back to what was called the European refugee crisis in 2015, you might be thinking about these people landing on Greek islands coming from Syria, North Africa and elsewhere. And abandoning these very arresting images of abandoned life jackets on the shores of Greek islands. If I'd asked you this question about 10 years ago, or this also might have come to mind just now, you might have thought something like this. Refugee camps far away in quite inhospitable places. So on the left is a camp called Dadab in Kenya, which is home to hundreds, several hundred thousand Somali refugees. And on the right you have a camp 5,000 kilometres away but looking awfully similar in Jordan in a place called Al-Azrak, which is home to around 40,000 Syrian refugees. There's space for many more in that camp, but funny enough, not many people want to go and live there. But these questions about where you see refugees and what you have in your mind's eye when you talk about refugees, these sort of idea of rows of white tents with blue UN logos, the reality is actually quite different. Refugees are neither mainly in places like this nor are they mainly in Europe. There are 35 million refugees around the world and 76% of them are in low and middle income countries and not in Europe or North America. They may have generally crossed one border and they've probably done it on land. And that means they're still in the region where they have been impacted by violence and conflict. And the country of asylum they're in may also be affected by that conflict or be fragile in other ways. Figures are really hard to come by and not particularly reliable, but it's thought that around 60% of refugees around the world are living in towns and cities, not in camps. There's possibly around 20% of the total in camps and the rest will be in rural areas. So the reality of refugees is something a bit more like this. This is an unfinished building in Beirut in Lebanon on the left and on the right. It's not a great image, but I think you can just about see people building shacks on the roofs of an apartment building living on a balcony and living in what is probably already an informal settlement. The quality of the housing there doesn't look great. So there might be someone like that or they may be living in an informal settlement. That's the way to refer to a slum in somewhere like Nairobi. But despite the fact that most refugees are not living in camps, it would seem that outside of the European context, most humanitarian funding for refugees is channeled to camps. And there's some reasons for this. So they don't know like great places to live, but they're actually quite attractive to hosting governments and to aid agencies. So a government can put a fence around a place in the middle of nowhere in the desert and say, we welcome these simple interests out of this country. They're here now, UN, will you do something about them please? Because they need water and shelter and food and health and education. So it's a way of controlling population. It's a way of delivering aid in an supposedly efficient manner. You can also take Angelina Jolie to one of these places. I think she's been to both, well she won't have been to Azrak, but she's definitely been to another camp in Jordan. You can take a Hollywood actress, walk her around the camp, take some photos and use that as a great fundraising tool. Sorry for the cynicism. So camps are remotely located for a reason to keep people out of the labour market, out of the housing market. They create a dependency and I don't mean that in the fact that refugees become lazy and just want to sit around receiving aid. They can't work. In most cases they can't leave the camp. Those areas, there's not lots of jobs in those places where those camps are located. And they also are often not permitted to work and work in the camp is very limited and poorly paid. And they end up having extremely low quality of life and that to me is a big irony. If you build something in the middle of the desert and you make people live there and yet you don't give them enough food, which is what happens. And they're going hungry and there's no future for them or their children. And we're paying for this out of our humanitarian tax dollar, which I think you can tell from my tone of voice I find quite annoying. So we also think that putting people in the middle of the desert like that and making them dependent on assistance is an extremely expensive thing to do. And we put the question mark expensive because it's actually very difficult to find out what it costs to keep people in a camp. Camps are supposed to be temporary fixes to an acute problem, but they can stay in place for decades. So the camp I showed you on the left there, Dadaab camp in Kenya, it's been there since 1991. And there are people there who are grandparents who've never known another life. So the question is, could we be spending the money on camps in a better way? And that is the focus of a research project that IID is leading with funding from the British Academy. We're working with engineers from UCL and from the Jordanian University of Societs and Technology, and with a Jordanian think tank called WANA. And I would have loved to have done a study of an entire refugee camp. Take it sector by sector, which is how aid is organised, as Kate will explain, and go through what has been spent on housing, on education, on health, on security and on water. But that would be a project I think beyond the funding level of particular call that we applied for to the British Academy. So we focus on just one sector, which is wash, water, sanitation, and the H is for hygiene promotion. And that's the humanitarian terminology for giving people water and sanitation. And we chose one country, we chose Jordan. And we chose to work in this camp, well, to find data about this camp called Zattery, which is better connected than the other camp you saw in Jordan. It's closer to an existing urban centre. It's relatively porous. People are able to leave. They're supposed to, but there are people who are able to come in and out. Some people do leave the camp to work during the day. Others find irregular ways of leaving the camp. And in order to answer this question, what can we do differently with the money, we need to find what's been spent in Zattery camp on water and sanitation. And then we're working with engineers to work out what could have been done to provide to improve the water situation in Mafrax City, which is in the same Governorate as the camp. And choosing water, we did that very specifically because Jordan has won the world's most water scarce countries. It relies on groundwater aquifers that are being depleted more quickly than they can be filled. And Jordanians in towns and cities get water 24 to 48 hours per week. So you have to pump the water from the system. You have to store it. When the water comes on, you have to turn on the taps and do your washing. There's a huge burden there on girls and women who are responsible for water management and have to be there ready to use the water when it comes on. It's also an extremely ageing network with lots of leaks. Water theft is a big issue, referred to euphemistically as non-revenue water, the water that doesn't get to the place where it's supposed to get for a variety of reasons. So there are lots of problems with the water system. So our question was, if we're spending all this money on water and sanitation in a camp, could we not be spending that money instead in a city and improving water supply and sanitation for everyone? And just briefly, before I hand over to Kate, just briefly, in the Jordan context, 80% of refugees are in urban areas, living in the capital or somewhere like this. And there are 630,000 Syrian refugees registered in the country, possibly more than a million in total. And Mafraq City, Zaatari Camp, is home to around 80,000 refugees currently. And Mafraq City is home to 130,000 people. We don't know how many refugees are there, but we know that there are around 80,000 in the whole province or the governorate of Mafraq. So we knew it was going to be hard to find out what had been spent on water and sanitation in the camp. We knew it was going to be a difficult question to answer, but we didn't know it was going to be nigh on impossible. So this caused a problem, being able to respond to the overarching research question that we'd asked the British Academy for money to answer. But luckily, IID funded the way it is. I was able to access some additional resources to bring on board one of the researchers from UCL, who can't be here today. Her name is Ana Magalitha Grafias Royo, and she's done a lot of work on this with us. And also, I was able to ask Kate, who's on our advisory board, to dig into the data. And that is what she's going to do now and tell us what she found. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a whistle-stop tour of the frameworks that the WHO consider for evaluating whether water and sanitation are safe for people. And on the left-hand side there, you can see the criteria we look at for drinking water. And on the right-hand side, the criteria we look at for the sanitation chain. And as Lucy mentioned, this point about whether water supply is continuous, whether you have water for a few hours a week or every day, has a massive knock-on effect in terms of hygiene and health because the longer water is left standing, the less effective the chlorination becomes. And so all of these criteria of making sure lots of people have access to water, making sure they have a sufficient quantity of water to keep clean, to cook, and for drinking. To make sure that that water is of a potable quality or a quality that can be maintained, monitored. And that people can also afford it. So if the water, cost of water, represents a lot of your income, that is a threat to health. On the other side, the sanitation chain is very much the out-of-site, out-of-mind part of this cycle. And we often think about, if we think about it at all, sanitation will be about sewage and sewerage and networks of those things that we don't see, we don't want to know about. But as you'll see in a minute, when you establish a refugee camp on land that has nothing, no infrastructure, the approach is slightly different. So these icons will pop up again. But the point of setting that up for you is just to show why the systems evolve in the way that they do when you're starting from zero. So in a camp setting, there's a little icon at the top left there that looks like a thermometer, and it's supposed to represent a borehole. So a borehole is a well from which you pump water and then usually you do have to treat it, at least chlorinate it. And at the very start of the crisis in Jordan, that boundary would have been Zattery Camp. There was a borehole many kilometres away and water was trucked. The solution initially is to have collective tap stands. So you bring your truck of water, you fill a tank, and people have to attend a collective water source. Same for latrines. Latrines are dug and lined, we hope, but they're shared. So they have to be collective and they have to be desludged, so they have to be pumped out and that has to be trucked away out of sight, out of mind, trucked away and dumped, usually. And it was initially. So as time goes on, the priority became bring water closer. So boreholes, the wells, were sunk within the boundary of the camp. It still had to be trucked from there to tanks, but you can see that incrementally they're trying to reduce the operation cost by bringing the water closer. Latrines became private individual latrines instead of collective public toilets. And time went on again, and this time the emphasis is on trying to network to some extent the sewage connection. So instead of latrines, thinking about a network for sewage to flow into, and most importantly and under great pressure from the Jordanian government, that sludge had to be treated. So wastewater treatment plant was installed again very costly and it has to be installed and then the water can be discharged for agricultural purposes. And that is the end game or where the camps it's in 2021. So there's some progress there and you can imagine not cheap to do that. So meanwhile in the area surrounding the camp there is already a water utility company called the Yarmouk Water Company. And their objectives, and you can think about this from a kind of tens water perspective, if you like, they already have an established infrastructure. It may be aged, but they do. And what their challenges are, adding more people to the water network. So more people have access to safe or as the WHO has it improved water. And the much more lagging population connected to the sanitation chain or a safe sanitation chain. So it's about half the number of people connected to water that are connected to the sewage system. And that has improved, but that's what, over that same period that that camp was being built that's what this water company were trying to do. So what does that look like? Sorry about the graphs. This is the engineering section of the presentation. But in the top left you can see the total water supply that the Yarmouk Water Company is handling. It's in million cubic metres, it's hard to imagine those volumes, but all you have to think about there is comparing it to what's underneath, which is the very, very small quantities of water that the camp is providing in comparison. So you're in a governorate, there's a utility company providing masses and masses of water, but not here. Here they've got their own self-contained setup. The red is the losses from the network. And they sit at around 46% to 48%. Don't be too horrified, UK is 22% for our network. So it's double that, but we're not in a great situation ourselves. On the right-hand side is the water per person. Very important to notice that in Jordan and in that water company's service area, that's going down. The liters per person per day is going down over time. And those numbers are already fairly low. In the UK you might expect that to be double. But they're not very different from the amount of water that's being provided in the camp. So you can imagine this camp is in a situation where people are already dealing with huge water challenges and they've managed to provision an almost equivalent service in the camp. But not for the same amount of money. So on the left-hand side, you can see the supply cost per meter cubed. So that's in terms of the volume of water for Jordan and for the camp. And evidently the camp seems to be much higher. But I will add that the costs in Jordan include everything. They include water, they include sanitation, they include water treatment of sewage. For the camp, it's just water. We couldn't find anything about sanitation. And the numbers are very unclear and there's only a couple of years where we have numbers. And this is over a 10-year period. So the numbers were very, very, very hard to find. And on the right-hand side, per person, we're looking at the costs now, not per unit of water. And again, very low, if you're a water utility company, you have economies of scope and scale. And very inconsistent data, patchy data, and much more expensive-looking services for the camp. So the final part of what we try to do with Maggie at UCL is to look at the breakdown that we established from all of the work on the reports from that time, interviews with people, very little data, but just being able to go through lots and lots of reports. And then we compared it to the international aid transparency initiatives, data repository. And we looked at all of the data for UNICEF, which is the overarching agency, UN Agency with Responsibility for Water. And we tried to compare the data that UNICEF had put in the public domain with the data that we could glean from reports. And what we found was that there was very little, disappointingly little. And the other horrifying thing is that UNICEF collected almost no data at the beginning of the response. There's hardly anything. There's very patchy data about sanitation. There's a tiny bit of data about energy and fuel, which are clearly really important when you're tracking things everywhere. And you can disaggregate it. Once you've got all this data and all the budget lines, you can then filter it for anything that you can find if you manually go through every line of data and tag it that went to Zatari. Hardly any account, right? So not very transparent. And this is not for want of having every single aid agency. I don't know if anyone here has worked for an aid agency, but you must fill in budget lines for absolutely every detail. This just gives you an idea of the amount, dollar amount that were in the budget lines. At the far left side, there were documents in the repository of data for ring binders, reams of A4 paper, banners that had been printed. And on the far right-hand side, enormous multi-year construction services contracts with no breakdown, no disaggregation, no evidence that they went geographically to a particular location. No idea what the money was spent on. So it can be collected. Astonishing. And in some ways laughable. But I emphasise again, that's all I'm going to say for now, that pulling this together and finding these numbers is almost impossible. It must be somewhere, you would think. It's from the UK government. We passed money over to those countries, to this disaster. We don't know. We don't know how much. But we're going to try and estimate. We're going to try and estimate. We've done as much as we can. So I think it's going to be me with a clicker. I suppose in summary, we know that it was very expensive because there are some evaluations of the wash response in Jordan. They talk about $350 million being spent on water in just five years on the refugee response. But anything more detailed than that is really hard to come by. And one of the things that Maggie and Kate have found is that often in the reports, there'll be huge figures bouncing around in these reports. But it's not clear where the money's going. So sometimes it'll say the running costs of the camps are $24 million annually. And then you'll see another report talking about just one camp costing $9 million. So it's not really clear. We know it's hugely expensive, massively more expensive to supply the camp than somebody living in a city. But we have very little clarity on where these huge sums of money have been spent. And we have tried to ask directly, and I didn't make this point, but I've requested numerous meetings with UNICEF, which is the agency responsible for water in Jordan, in the regional office, and also at New York level. And nobody wanted to speak to me, apart from one engineer working in Zaatari, who was very generous with his time. And said he would share data on costs. And a few days later he was told that he was not allowed to share that data on the costs. And it's partly because that data isn't there, but it also is embarrassing. A lot of mistakes were made, and there was corruption. They cited the camp over in Aquifer, which is not a great idea, particularly when people started digging their own latrines and I think not lining them. Huge mistakes were made. But no one was honest about these mistakes. Even an internal evaluation of the response that was funded by UNICEF, the evaluators were not given the detail they needed. It even says in this publicly available evaluation, we cannot comment on the efficiency and effectiveness of this response, because we have not been given the adequate financial data. And this is one of the issues that we have. So why does it matter there's very little data available? Well, it matters if you're going to work out of what you're doing is a good idea, whether you should do the same again next time, or perhaps you should consider some other possibility. I mean, there are all sorts of answers to these questions, and I can see people nodding and smiling. I guess some of it is quite obvious that if you're going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on something, don't you want to make sure that you're delivering good service, that people in that camp are having a decent quality of life? I'm not sure how much people care about that. But anyway, the other interesting thing about Jordan, and this is where I'm going to turn to Romler as well, is that I had a trip there, we both had a trip there last year in November, and I had a series of meetings at national government level with a ministry of planning and international cooperation. And I asked them and also followed up in an email, roughly, what's the percentage of humanitarian funding going to the camps versus humanitarian funding going to elsewhere in the country or into the cities? And the answer was, we don't know, we don't have that information. And I found that a bit confusing, so I followed up in an email and I got the same response. They just don't know. And this seems odd to me because at a local level, these conversations with the mayor, the people within the municipality of Amman, the capital city, if there's money coming into your city for refugees, plausibly, it could be very useful for everybody to benefit from the services. And if I'm a planner, which I'm not, Romler's a planner, which I'm going to get a chance to, but if I was a planner working in Amman, and I knew there was tens of millions of dollars coming into the city for particular programs around health or education or, I don't know, what else? No one knows, but this money's coming in. Wouldn't I want to sort of make sure that was complementing my own resources or my own plans for city improvements or expansions? But when we asked this question in the municipality of Amman about where the resources were going, there was, we've got these blank faces, like, oh, that's nothing to do with us. That's dealt with people higher up. And that was a reference to the court and to the king. The sensitivity around refugees in Jordan, given their history of hosting refugees, which Romler can talk about, is huge. And it's a separate world. If you're a planner in Amman, it's a separate world, these humanitarian responses that are flowing into your country, regardless of the fact that everybody in Amman could be benefiting from those. So I'm going to hand the clicker over to Romler, or I can just click through the questions. I mean, first of all, do you have an answer to this question? Why does it matter that there's very little data available? I thought that would be the sort of question that you would be answering. For me, I sort of entered into this sort of tangentially, because I came from, as Lucy said, I came from an urban and a planning background. So it was, I came to this from the perspective of looking at how refugees transform cities. And then over time, I began to realize that there was this entire world of humanitarian planning that was also trying to reshape urban areas in particular ways. And there's a certain kind of ambition by certain individuals within organizations to do that. But to what extent, as Lucy points out, that is actually being done is quite difficult to track. So I don't necessarily think I have an answer to why there's such a lack of transparency around humanitarian funding. But it should matter, as you pointed out, because we should know where the money is going and how it's helping people. I mean, if I look at the comments that you've made and the data that you shared, what becomes obvious is that you have a significant amount of money that we are being told is being spent on a very small area for a very small subset of people when it could be better spent elsewhere. And spent in a way where it would bring about more socially just outcomes for a bigger group of people. So I think all of us are sort of on the same page in terms of making the point that we really shouldn't have camps. We shouldn't have camps because they're inhumane. Pending people, let's just be realistic about the language that we use, confining and penning people into a small area from which very often they simply cannot leave is an inhumane thing to do and to do that for decades and to rob them of the opportunity to make a life for themselves is inhumane. It is not something that any of us would want to do. We wouldn't want to be in that position. So from that perspective, the camps are wrong. But also looking at the ways in which this data is made so opaque tells us even more about the humanitarian system which creates this very particular fiction of protecting and saving people and keeping them alive. And we are told that it's done at some cost but we don't actually know what that cost is either. So we're told to open our wallets several times in the year. We're told to give to charity and for various fundraising events. But rightly I think there's a lot of cynicism amongst people. Certainly I see that with a lot of my friends who don't want to give to the bigger NGOs and they always want to find smaller NGOs that they feel are more responsive and are more transparent and give their money there because they have this view and I think your presentation has in a way strengthened that view that a lot of the money is simply unaccounted for. So how does that actually affect how we see these organizations and how we believe in them and their transparency? I want to sort of take this in a slightly different direction. And Lucy and I had kind of thought about how I could contribute to this conversation and we had a few discussions back and forth and she was quite keen to kind of think about what kind of data we needed to start planning, delivering responses to refugee crises in ways that would support the choices to live outside of camps in cities or in rural areas or in other places. And this is where, and I agree and I absolutely agree with her. And so I want to sort of take both the presentations here together to kind of think about what are the ways in which data is made visible both within the camps and within urban environments. So I'm going to put on a planning hat now and I'm going to ask in relation to Muffrock City where, you know, which is next to Zaatari Camp, do we have accurate data for that city? So how much data do we have for that city in terms of the services that are being provided? So how much water, how much electricity, you know, the sanitation services, not just at a sort of a city-wide level but can be desegregated down to the household level and see how much a household is using. And in that question, I want to ask also who is included in that data and who isn't included in that data. And the reason why I raise this point is because in a lot of countries that we all work in, there are a lot of politics around who is counted and who isn't counted and who is doing the counting. So I think I would probably, like, if you want to convince a city government or even a national government because we can have this entire conversation about how particularly within the Jordan context but also in many other places, you don't have that level of decentralization. So, you know, going back to the point that she was making that, you know, she wanted to find out about this data but it was held higher up. This is a highly centralized system. So when you go to a place like Muffrock City, they don't really have much control over the humanitarian responses that are carried out within their jurisdiction. That is not within their decision-making abilities. That is something that is done through the line ministries. So the local governments don't really have a say if an NGO comes in and starts implementing certain things within Muffrock City. At least that was what I was told and I've been told this several times on many of the trips that I've made. So if you have to convince the governments that actually it's better to take this money that is coming through the humanitarian funding chain and instead of putting a camp in the middle of the desert and then going through this process of relocating the borewells and changing the water infrastructure and trying to find ways to reduce the costs of trucking water and trucking the sludge and all of that, if you just connected it to the network, it would cost a lot less. Do you actually have that data for the people who are living in Muffrock City to make the case? Well, probably not for everybody. We're in certain neighborhoods but there are other parts of Muffrock City where we found that refugee households were not connected to water or to sanitation and this wasn't something that was sort of known about or spoken about within the Yarmouk Water Company and those people are kind of off the map and I think we all have experiences of working in informal settlements where over decades people had to just convince the government that they exist and they deserve to be mapped and they deserve services and they can pay for services if services were to be delivered but what's I think interesting also about the Jordan context is that Syrians are just the latest refugees to arrive in Jordan. Prior to that there were the Iraqi refugees during the Gulf War. There's clearly huge numbers of Palestinians in Jordan with different statuses but even prior to that, hundreds of years ago, Circassian refugees arrived in Oman and there's a country built on flows of people around the region and yet we're not in a position and this is not my point, this is something someone, an NGO worker said to me when I was in Oman we should be able to say exactly what it costs for a refugee family to live in Oman for a year what it costs for their housing, what they would need in terms of a subsidy for housing, food, water we should just be able to say how much money that costs and next time there's a refugee crisis the Jordanian government can just go to the donors and say we need X amount of money per year to absorb these additional populations into our cities but we seem like we're not in a place where we can give that number and if we can't give that number about the city we can't do a cost comparison with the camp and we don't have the data about the camp either so we're in basically a bit of a data vacuum and we carry on in this emergency phase ten years on, more than ten years camps are meant to be for emergencies it's no longer an emergency the Syrian crisis is not acute anymore and yet we carry on with this humanitarian mentality and it seems very hard to make it stop and Kate you have some views on this now about the issue of humanitarian hindsight so final question for Romula is it feasible to think of a world where we no longer have long-term refugee camps? Exactly and in thinking about this question I wanted to sort of open up this discussion of the work that camps do I want to go back to the word you used they they put refugees in camps and I want to ask who is the they and why do they put the refugees in camps in other words who are these people what is their agenda and what are the sort of reasons behind their insistence on putting people in these open air prisons now there's it's quite interesting that you you raised this point about that what you've heard are people saying that they would be safer in these camps or better attended to if they're in camps I think a lot of the sort of refugee literature for some time has also talked about this is really a security measure that a lot of states deploy so there's a certain kind of the camp acts as a certain fiction it acts as a fiction that migration can be controlled and contained and people can be stopped from coming I'm just thinking back to the news story yesterday about 70 people who drowned in the Mediterranean and there's a parallel here with a lot of countries who also have detention centers or who have systems and processes in place of turning boats back which goes against international law and they do a lot of these things there's certain countries for example who have very openly in their policy said that they do these things to deter asylum seekers from coming to their countries by showing them how dangerous it is to cross these dangerous seas because you might drown and if you come we will put you in a detention center and the detention center and the camps they're not the same and I've made this argument many times they're not the same but some of the intentionality behind it is similar in that you are putting people in a particular place because the idea again is you will go back you are not going to stay here you are going to go back to the point that I've really been trying to pull out over the last several years because when I first started I believed in this narrative that somehow local communities and refugees would clash with each other I think a lot of us believe that people especially in many countries that may have resource scarcities and so forth that they would be competing with each other and one of the things that we've come to realize actually it's much more complicated than that it's not always a clash with each other in many of these countries in Jordan for example many of the people share ethnic and cultural backgrounds they have families that have lived across the border so in one of the podcasts that I did recently one of the interviewees was someone who was Jordanian but he came from a Syrian and Palestinian background but he had lived in Jordan and had Jordanian citizenship and he talked about that journey of feeling that he as if he didn't belong in any of he simultaneously belonged everywhere but was always questioned wherever he went and I want to raise this point because for a lot of people who get displaced across borders they will first go to those countries where they have family where they have relatives and there will be a level of support for them so why do we make camps for people to separate them in these countries is it really because they are going to be protected and supported to make a delivery efficient is it really so that there aren't clashes between different groups of people or are there perhaps other reasons as to why they and I imagine the day is a shorthand for the government to want to put people in camps I think we need to tackle that question first before we start to imagine a world without camps because I think we would all like to see a world without camps and I want to also come back to some of the points that you were making maybe after this kind of after we talk about this the day is the hosting government but it's also the UN and the international system and the donors because they're the ones paying for the camps we put in place and they always say well if we didn't offer this then it's possible that the government would close its borders and the refugees would be stuck on the wrong side of a conflict which is a very powerful argument to make but I don't think anybody really knows what happens in those closed door negotiations between the UN, the donors and the hosting government one of the reasons for doing this piece of research was to at least try and see if we can make the money argument for not putting the camp together if in 2012 the UN and the UK and the US and other big donors had sat down with the Jordanian government and said instead of setting up this camp that's going to cost billions and billions of dollars and it's very likely to be in place for decades and we should do some research on the average time that a camp is in place instead if they'd said we'll pay this up front we'll give you grants to improve your infrastructure we'll give you grants to build city extensions in places where your cities are going to grow anyway for now refugees can live in those places later on in the Jordanian populations the world bank's on board with this you've got soft loans for this for the X number of years no I can't believe anybody's making those arguments and one of the points of this project was to start at least being able to put a number on some of those costs up front and I think perhaps once we get able to talk publicly I think it costs maybe then the UN will come and say no no that's not right it costs this much and we'll be able to answer the question finally