Amman has been central to the experience of refugees in the Arab region from late Ottoman times to the present. Employing a method of site biography, this article writes refuge in Amman backward, peeling back the multiple layers of refuge from the newest to the oldest. It starts in the present, in the abandoned houses where Syrian refugees have found refuge in the wake of the Syrian uprising-turned-war. Then it opens onto an older layer, a refugee camp where Palestinian Nakba survivors forged their own refuge. Finally, it uncovers the Ottoman layer beneath the camp, the land grants through which North Caucasian Muslim refugees helped found the city itself. The layered spatial image presented here, which shows different histories coexisting architecturally within a single neighborhood, is an argument for understanding refuge and the city as multitemporal. At stake in putting down in writing ignored temporal sediments is a reclamation of the different hopes and desires that shaped such urban experiences of refuge, inhabitation, and solidarity during times of crisis.

In the summer of 2018, seven years into the uprising turned war in Syria, I arrived at a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman. I was there to interview a Syrian woman. She had left Damascus in 2013 when Palestinian relatives offered her an apartment, rent-free. The apartment, part of a multistory concrete building, was self-constructed by Palestinian refugees. But now, all three apartments in the building were inhabited by Syrian families. A few years later, a Syrian of Circassian origin told me a similar story. He and his family were given a rent-free house. The single-family house was also built by a previous group of refugees, Circassians, the descendants of late nineteenth-century Ottoman refugees. The 1970s stone house is located in the Circassian quarter east of the camp. In fact, the Palestinian camp itself is built on land owned by a Circassian family to this day. Syrian and Sudanese families also shared how Palestinian and Jordanian neighbors helped them furnish their empty apartments in the Circassian quarter. With these observations, we are already at the central point of this essay. That Syrians found refuge in the houses and housing of earlier refugees may at first seem surprising, at least to someone expecting refugees to find refuge solely through Western humanitarian aid (that is, in camps as the singular spatiality of “refugee crisis”). But it is not at all surprising when situated within Amman’s urban history—in what architectural historian Rami Daher has called its “multilayered beginnings.”¹

1. Rami Farouk Daher, “Qualifying Amman: The City of Many Hats,” in Villes, pratiques urbaines et construction nationale en Jordanie, ed. Myriam Ababsa and Rami Farouk Daher, Cahiers de l’Ifpo (Beyrouth: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2013), 65–89.

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