Beauty in the Built Environment and Refugee Self-Reliance Policy Brief

Stephanie Acker and Dr. Devora Neumark

December 2023

Acker, S., & Neumark, D. (2023). Beauty in the built environment and refugee self-reliance (Policy Brief No. 2023/19). European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Migration Policy Centre.

Women were trained to take part in the maintenance of tents at Jeddah camp in Iraq. Women putting a decorative tarp on a tent, Jeddah, Iraq.

Photo: Sami Abdulla, 2019

Summary

This policy brief demonstrated that purposeful home beautification practices among refugees, ranging from physical modifications to daily rituals, enhance individual and community wellbeing while advancing the Global Compact on Refugees’ goal of self-reliance. Drawing on four research studies conducted between 2008 and 2023 across more than 30 countries, the brief showed how beautification allows refugees to exert agency, integrate past and present experiences, and heal from intergenerational trauma. At the community level, beautification fosters hope, builds social bonds, and exhibits resistance and resilience. The brief challenged conventional self-reliance frameworks, arguing that beauty in the built environment is not a luxury but a necessary condition for life, and called on policymakers to recognise refugees as creative agents actively contributing to their communities rather than passive recipients of aid.

Key Takeaways

Refugees worldwide, across more than 30 countries and six different legal statuses, consistently invest significant effort in beautifying their living spaces through painting walls, hanging pictures, burning incense, creating gardens, and engaging in daily rituals, even in temporary accommodations and despite knowing they may be evicted.
Beautification allows refugees to exert agency when control is otherwise limited. “Simple acts” like rearranging a home or intentionally placing an object enable refugees to infuse spaces with their own identity and resist the way being labelled a refugee causes other identities to be overshadowed or disappear entirely.
Home beautification serves as a bridge between past and present, providing tangible ways to remember previous homes, honour the loss of home, and recreate a sense of home in the present. Dr. Neumark’s research with over 200 displaced individuals found that when children participate in beautification alongside family and can imagine past homes through shared stories, these acts become transformative, healing intergenerational trauma and preserving identity.
At the community level, beautification fosters hope by providing a visual representation of a brighter future, builds social bonds through culturally specific rituals of hospitality and celebration, and serves as a form of resistance and resilience that fortifies communities against the challenges of displacement.
Beautification is both a foundation for and catalyst of refugee self-reliance across multiple domains of the Self-Reliance Index, including housing, education, health, employment, safety, and social connections. However, existing self-reliance frameworks (at the time of publication) fail to capture this dimension, and the language of refugee policy must shift to recognise refugees as “creative agents” and “change-makers” rather than passive beneficiaries of aid.

Implications for Practitioners

Global Compact implementation: States and humanitarian actors implementing the Global Compact on Refugees should integrate beautification into self-reliance programming under Objective 2, recognising that aesthetic agency directly supports refugees’ capacity to meet their needs sustainably and with dignity.
Measurement and accountability: Self-reliance measurement frameworks, including the Self-Reliance Index, should expand beyond the current 12 domains to include beautification as a validated indicator. Researchers should systematically test beautification’s measurable impact across domains including housing quality, children’s educational outcomes, mental health, employment resilience, and social capital.
Shelter and camp policy reform: Shelter standards, camp management protocols, and settlement design guidelines should mandate provisions for personalisation and aesthetic expression. Policies restricting modifications to living spaces should be reviewed and revised to enable participatory design processes that empower refugees as co-creators of their built environment.
Decolonising self-reliance frameworks: Policymakers should acknowledge and address the Western bias in current self-reliance definitions by expanding the concept beyond economic independence to encompass social, emotional, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions that reflect diverse cultural values and practices of home-making and community resilience.
Narrative and definitional change: Refugee policy language at all levels (international conventions, national frameworks, programme design, monitoring and evaluation) must shift from framing refugees as “burdens on host countries” and “passive recipients of aid” to recognising them as “creative agents” and “change-makers” who actively contribute to community wellbeing and development.