The project of a Syrian-born artist and architect and an Iraqi-born author, this installation invites viewers to imagine what refugees leave behind when the pack up the few things they can carry and flee an oppressive regime or war-torn country.

The UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage installation by Mohamad and Ahmed Badr “sculpturally re-creates rooms, homes, buildings and landscapes that have suffered the ravages of war. Each is embedded with the voices and stories of real people — from Afghanistan, Congo, Syria, Iraq and Sudan — who have escaped those same rooms and buildings to build a new life in America.”

Visitors can listen to the stories of refugees on headsets attached to each diorama in the series, complete with “miniature cars, tiny living room sets, and even fake plants adorn the open luggage—installations which each” took months to complete.

The work hits at all levels: the scenes look small and fragile, familiar but derelict, while framing them inside baggage conjures images of flight. Together with the audio, they are powerful awareness-raising tools in the fight to humanize refugee situations.

More about its creators: “A Syrian artist and architect, Mohamad was born in Damascus, raised in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and educated in the Midwestern United States. Expressing the juxtaposition of East and West within him, Hafez’s art reflects the political turmoil in the Middle East through the compilation of found objects, paint and scrap metal. His work has been profiled by NPR , New Yorker Magazine, and The New York Times. With four highly acclaimed exhibits under his belt, Hafez creates surrealistic Middle Eastern streetscapes that are architectural in their appearance yet politically charged in their content.”

“Ahmed is a writer, social entrepreneur, poet, and former refugee from Iraq. With work featured by Instagram, NPR, The Huffington Post, Adobe, United Nations, and others, Ahmed explores the intersection between creativity, the refugee experience, and youth empowerment. Ahmed is attending Wesleyan University, where he is a Fellow at the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. Ahmed is the host of TOGETHER, a UN Migration Agency podcast that is centered around the stories of refugee and migrant youth across the world.”

Former mayor of the world’s second-largest refugee camp, humanitarian Kilian Kleinschmidt notes “the average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation.” These places need to be recognized as what they are: “cities of tomorrow,” not the temporary spaces we like to imagine. “In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city,” Kleinschmidt said in an interview. Short-term thinking on camp infrastructure leads to perpetually poor conditions, all based on myopic optimism regarding the intended lifespan of these places.

Many refugees may never be able return home, and that reality needs to be realized and incorporated into solutions. Treating their situation as temporary or reversible puts people into a kind of existential limbo; inhabitants of these interstitial places can neither return to their normal routines nor move forward with their lives.. On the one hand, assert experts like Kleinschmidt, planners need build up refugee camps to be durable and sufficient places in their own right. On the other, they also need to move refugee migrants toward countries and regions where they will end up virtuously integrated into struggling economies, including (though controversially): areas of nearby Europe with unused housing and high labor needs.

Beyond providing more thoroughly for essentials, Kleinschmidt sees additional opportunities to enable refugees with new technologies: “With a [3D-printing] Fab Lab people could produce anything they need – a house, a car, a bicycle, generating their own energy, whatever,” he said. Unfortunately, governmental bureaucracies and aid organizations are reluctant to push boundaries and try new approaches. More fundamentally: they frequently fail to recognize the need for robust solutions that help facilitate refugees who are themselves working hard to create real places for living.

“I think we have reached the dead end almost where the humanitarian agencies cannot cope with the crisis,” he said. “We’re doing humanitarian aid as we did 70 years ago after the second world war. Nothing has changed.” Kleinschmidt worked with the United Nations and their High Commission for Refugees for 25 years before starting an independent consultancy that continues to address humanitarian issues around the globe.

His previous senior roles included deputy humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, deputy special envoy for assistance to Pakistan, acting director for communities and minorities in the U.N. administration in Kosovo, executive secretary for the Migration and Refugee Initiative (MARRI) in the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, and many field-based functions with U.N.H.C.R., U.N.D.P. and W.F.P. He worked extensively in Africa, Southeastern Europe, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The dystopian bemusement pop-up theme park known Dismaland, a project of UK artist Banksy, is now closed but its dismantled pieces and parts will find second lives as architecture and infrastructure for refugees across the English Channel in the French port city of Calais.

Known collectively as “The Jungle,” a series of mostly-informal refugee camps around the Port of Calais temporarily house asylum seekers from troubled countries including Darfur, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Most of The Jungle’s occupants are looking for ways into the United Kingdom, legally or otherwise.

Working fixtures, furniture and furnishings will be appropriated more directly, while more complex structures are being disassembled to be reused as raw materials for shelters and services. While camps have existed in the area for years, they are in constant conflict with authorities and generally lack even basic day-to-day amenities.

Lasting just over a month, Dismaland attracted over 150,000 visitors, featuring works by Banksy and 58 other artists. Dismaland was a surprise installation to the residents of seaside Somerset, England, who were told the construction efforts were building toward a film set for an upcoming movie (images via Wikipedia and Colossal).

In the last 30 years, the size of a typical home in the United States has shot up from under 1000 square feet to nearly 2500. It begs the question: how much room to we really need in order to live?

Once a Laotian refugee and, now, a German architect, Van Bo Le-Mentzel understands firsthand what it means to be homeless, displaced but also to feel a sense of owning your own space both emotionally and financially.

Thus his contribution to the small homes movement – a do-it-yourself mini-house that tilts and folds to reveal a bed, desk and light, complete with a window as well as lockable door.

In short: it has the very basic essentials for survival, but also is necessarily a space you venture out from and use as an urban home base, not a remote hiding place.

Plans for the one-square-meter (or 1SQM) house are available for free, along with its bare-banes list of essential building components: “20 meters of wooden timbers (3.4 cm x 3.4 cm) for 250 Euro (300 Dollars), Wall Coverings (Sperrholz), 200 Screws, 4 wheels, 1 acryl-glass window, 1 door and 1 day of your lifetime to build it.”