Hope, Home, and Beauty in the Built Environment: Why Aesthetics Matter in Displacement Contexts

Stephanie Acker and Dr. Devora Neumark

Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), U.S. Department of State

Virtual Brown Bag

August 22, 2024

Casa Pintada participant / community member uses paint roller to add colourful designs on his house front.

Photo: Blumont Group, 2022

Summary

This presentation to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration Virtual Brown Bag series drew from mixed-methods research including Dr. Devora Neumark’s participatory arts-based research with forcibly displaced individuals in Canada, Stephanie Acker’s desk research examining beautification across nearly 100 published articles on displacement contexts, and community-led dialogues by Nizar ALayasa in West Bank refugee camps. The presentation demonstrated that intentional acts of beautification in the built environment matter profoundly for displaced individuals and communities, supporting wellbeing at both individual and community levels. Acts of beautification create pathways for refugees to process trauma through physical expression, reclaim a sense of control and agency, ground themselves in the present to imagine new futures, and connect generations through postmemory by honouring past homes while remaking home in displacement. Community-level benefits include promoting cohesion and resilience through collective projects such as Casa Pintada in Colombia, which strengthened both bonding and bridging social capital while facilitating integration between displaced and host communities. The presentation challenged the implicit reliance on Maslow’s Hierarchy in humanitarian policy, arguing that needs are not linear and that aesthetics intersect with psychosocial wellbeing, protection, shelter, and integration. It concluded with practical, low-cost steps for practitioners to embed beauty into humanitarian response in participatory, localised, and dignity-centred ways.

Key Takeaways

Beautification allows displaced individuals to process trauma and express complex emotions beyond words through physical expression. Displaced Palestinians in Al-Azza camp use gardening to beautify their surroundings and modify their spaces, creating acts of agency that restore dignity and a sense of control in contexts defined by constraint. Using simple tools like scissors and watering cans, residents ground themselves in the present moment, preventing anxiety about the past and enabling them to imagine different futures.

Intentional modification and decoration of home and space play a critical role in fostering intergenerational wellbeing and resilience. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory explains how collective and cultural trauma is inherited across generations, yet beautification practices can impact this cycle positively by transmitting coping mechanisms and sharing stories of home before displacement. Physical objects like soil and trees from pre-1948 Palestinian villages sustain connections across generations, promoting healing and preserving identity.

Beautification strengthens bonding and bridging social capital, fostering community resilience and integration. Collaborative efforts across different communities, as illustrated in the Casa Pintada project in Colombia, increased neighbourhood interactions and included displaced individuals in host communities. Aesthetics offer cross-sectoral benefits spanning psychosocial wellbeing, livelihoods, protection, and integration while upholding rights to cultural expression and participation in public life.

The marginalisation of aesthetics in humanitarian response stems partly from uncritical reliance on Maslow’s Hierarchy, which ranks beauty as non-essential despite evidence that wellbeing is non-linear and relational rather than hierarchical. Common concerns about cost, cultural relativism, or signalling permanence can be mitigated through participatory, localised approaches that recognise many beautification efforts are already low-cost and community driven.

Advancing aesthetics in humanitarian practice requires documenting existing community-led initiatives like recycling programs in Kakuma refugee camp, revising policies to allow personalisation of shelters, integrating beautification into operational checklists as standard practice, and engaging artists, designers, and local actors. This demonstrates that beauty is not a luxury add-on but a scalable, dignity-centred component of humanitarian response necessary for hope, home, and human flourishing.

Implications for Practitioners

Reframe aesthetics as psychosocial and protection infrastructure: Humanitarian actors should recognise beautification as integral to mental health, dignity, and post-traumatic growth rather than a secondary or decorative concern. Providing resources and opportunities for displaced individuals to garden, paint, and personalise shelter functions as therapeutic outlets that foster agency, reduce anxiety, and support trauma processing through physical expression beyond words.
Support intergenerational healing through homemaking practices: Programs should intentionally create space for families to modify and personalise living environments in ways that honour past homes and cultural memory. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, enabling shared aesthetic practices can strengthen identity continuity and resilience across generations, allowing children to connect with pre-displacement homes while building new lives in the present.
Leverage beautification to build social capital and integration: Shelter and settlement interventions should incorporate collective aesthetic projects modelled on initiatives like Casa Pintada in Colombia, which strengthened both bonding social capital within displaced communities and bridging social capital between displaced and host populations. Beautification can operate cross-sectorally, reinforcing livelihoods, protection, integration, and community cohesion simultaneously.
Shift policy and funding frameworks to allow personalisation: Policymakers and donors should critically examine how implicit reliance on Maslow’s Hierarchy deprioritises aesthetics and restricts shelter modification. Allowing personalisation, including aesthetic upgrades as eligible costs, and embedding “decorate and personalise” into operational checklists can institutionalise dignity without requiring major new funding streams, recognising that many beautification efforts are already low-cost and community driven.
Create enabling environments for community-led beautification: Practitioners should identify, document, and resource beautification efforts already led by displaced communities, such as recycling initiatives transforming plastic waste into decorative flowers in Kakuma refugee camp or community gardens in Palestinian camps. Providing small grants, access to materials, technical guidance, or regulatory flexibility can amplify existing creativity while reinforcing displaced individuals as agents, innovators, and cultural contributors rather than passive beneficiaries.