Moving Along, Stopping at: The gendering of the public spaces in Al Wehdat Camp in Amman, Jordan

Overview

In Al Wehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, women are usually seen in motion, attempting to navigate the camp space or move around it to complete their everyday errands within what is a highly male-dominated space. The spaces in which they stop, and stay, are limited. For this paper, I conduct an architectural investigation into the camp to understand the different ways architecture has contributed to the gendering of the public spaces in the camp, particularly in relation to two elements: streets and walls. Streets are fundamentally paths of activity and movement, paths along which women are usually seen moving, while walls are what construct interiors inside which activities take place, ones that women either visit or avoid, with both elements drawing lines of privacy, ownership, and safety. This investigation makes use of nine months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Al Wehdat Camp between 2019 and 2023, based on focus groups and interviews with women in the camp. I rely on the experience of the women to better understand the gendering of the camp space as a way of understanding the spatial production and transformation of the camp after six decades of its establishment. I also reflect on my own experience of researching the camp during the fieldwork, as a woman Palestinian and Jordanian scholar who stands at the threshold between being an insider and an outsider to the experiences of the women and the lived reality of Al Wehdat Camp.