Deborah Gans and DenIse Hoffman Brandt
Dadaab Urban Plan

“The refugee camps of today are the cities of tomorrow,” says New York–based architect Deborah Gans, who, with landscape architect Denise Hoffman Brandt, proposes reconfiguring Dadaab, Kenya, to better accommodate its three refugee settlements. Dadaab proves Gans’s point. The region around this arid town near the Somalia border, which ballooned to 200,000 people during Ethiopian military actions in Somalia in 2006, has housed the Dagahaley, Hagadera, and Ifo camps for more than 30 years. More recently, the trio of camps counted 135,000 inhabitants, mostly Somalis.