Rania Qawasma’s story of displacement and design

On the heels of this year’s Arab American Heritage Month, we sat down with Rania Qawasma to discuss her pathway to architecture as a third-generation Palestinian refugee and how she transformed her passion into a non-profit to support other displaced and unhoused people in the U.S.

Qawasma is a Palestinian American community organizer and a people’s architect who is working in the areas of social justice, equity, affordable housing, and the decolonization of one’s spaces. Rania is the founder and executive director of Daarna, a community-based organization using architecture and design to partner with and advocate for refugees and uprooted people to end displacement.  

She works actively with local and international organizations tackling the displacement crisis and advocating for refugees. Qawasma is part of the International Architecture for Refugees organization and founded Architecture for Refugees-USA with the vision to engage architects, designers, and community members to raise awareness on the issue of displacement.

As of December 2023, the United Nations estimates that there are over 110 million displaced people worldwide, with this number rapidly growing every day. Many of these people have lost their homes due to persecution, conflict, violence, and other human rights violations. A 2021 World Bank report estimates that, by 2050, the climate crisis could drive another 200 million people to be displaced.  

Architects will be increasingly called upon to deploy emergency design solutions that can rapidly respond to those in crisis around the world. And, here in the U.S., one does not need to look far to address a growing houselessness crisis. Qawasma’s inspiring story centers around the value design and architecture can bring to displaced and unhoused people everywhere.  

Qawasma talked to Jenine Kotob, AIA, Sr. Director of EDI Strategies at AIA, and an Arab American architect in Washington, DC about Daarna, her hopes for displaced people around the world, and much more.  

Jenine Kotob: What first inspired you to become an architect?

Rania Qawasma: Growing up as an activist in a politically aware family, and being a third-generation Palestinian refugee, I've always been deeply connected to people's struggles and injustices worldwide. Particularly, I’ve been drawn to the displacement of indigenous people and refugee crises. From a young age I’ve always wanted to help and contribute by building homes for those in need. Architecture, to me, embodies the concept of collaborative creation with communities—it's a form of activism and community engagement.  

When I was a teenager, I came across a book entitled, “Architecture for the Poor,” by Hassan Fathy, a renowned Egyptian architect. His philosophy and work centered on designing for marginalized and underserved people. Once I read that book, I realized exactly what I wanted to do. It framed my awareness and desire of why I want to become an architect.  

Kotob: I want to hear a bit about your journey after college and how you got to your work with Daarna.  

Qawasma: After I finished undergrad, I came to the U.S. and started searching for jobs, following the typical path for young architects. But it wasn't a smooth ride. I still have rejection emails from that time saved as reminders of my struggle. As an immigrant from Palestine who attended an international school, Birzeit University, I didn’t have the experience recognized by U.S. firms.  

Eventually I got a job and worked at several firms. But still, on the inside, I knew that I was not only an architect, but was also an organizer and an activist. I wanted to use my skills as an architect to uplift the causes I believed in and to support the communities that needed help and their voices to be heard.  

My path led me to work in affordable housing for the past eight years. That uncovered for me the connection between local displacements of people here and the global refugee crisis. It’s not only in faraway and distant places; locally, there are unhoused people all over. Houselessness is a form of forced displacement.  

I started advocating more about the crisis, drawing connections, organizing, and meeting with cities to tackle the root cause of these unjust issues. I wanted to design housing hubs for refugees and immigrants here, trying to formulate this idea in my head that it must come from the community.  

Through this work I realized those families were missing something more than just affordable places to live in – they also struggled to settle and adjust in those new places. I began looking at architecture from an angle that it’s not only providing structure, but a design tool for families and communities to build and thrive in their new neighborhoods.  

This mindset and work I’ve done guided the idea for founding Daarna ("our home" in Arabic), an organization providing design resources for families, especially refugees, and to create designs that center these groups to help them shape their living spaces and create a sense of home. It's about empowering them to build not just physical structures but also a way of life in their new surroundings. Looking at how we as designers and activists can work with refugees and uprooted people to provide a sense of home for them.

Kotob: It’s beautiful to hear your journey and the troubles of you navigating your own resettlement here while simultaneously earnestly caring for others.  

You’re drawing some practical applications of design and architecture, especially to better serve people who are displaced. How do you see design and architecture playing a role in the current global refugee and migration crisis?

Qawasma: I truly believe that architects and workers in the built environment shouldn’t be tied up with only one professional label, meaning we must look at our profession as an interdisciplinary one. I feel I should not just be an architect. Architecture touches on every aspect of people’s lives, and I feel that we are shaping how people can live their lives. We design spaces that people occupy, and we are responsible for being a part of these communities, fighting unjust discriminatory systems and helping to uplift and support the oppressed – each one of us as much as we can. We must look into the bigger picture and the holistic social, economic, and human-centered impact that our work has toward greater justice.

As someone who has been affected personally by forced displacement, the whole notion of my career is centered on impacting people’s lives and advancing the way that our humanity can be as a collective. I keep remembering how as a child I was always telling my grandfather, who lost his home in Jerusalem, that I wanted to grow up and build him a new home just to cheer him up. 

Kotob:  You touched on how this is personal to you, how you wanted to build a home for your grandfather. Hearing that, it feels like this process is healing to you. Can you talk to me about your own experience being a third-generation refugee and how this has impacted your life and career?  

Qawasma: When you’re a child, you don’t see some of your experiences as explicitly impacting you, but later you connect those dots. My family didn’t live in a refugee camp; however, we were forcibly displaced and lost our homes in the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic) and again in the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which impacted my upbringing, my connection to our land and our people.  

When I was elementary school age I lived in Jordan while my aunt was a teacher at an UNRWA-operated refugee camp school (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, an organization founded in 1949 to support Palestine’s refugees displaced in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon). She lived in the West Bank and she asked my parents if she could take me to spend a year with her while she was teaching at a refugee camp. I spent a full school year with her and every day we’d walk through the camp to get to the school. We walked between the cramped homes and shops, talked to people on our way to and from school. I remember asking people why they lived like this, why their homes were like this. I didn’t know what a refugee or a refugee camp was – I had no idea I was a refugee myself.  

That year shaped every aspect of my growing up and expanded my understanding of the connection between our struggle for liberation as Palestinians and other indigenous groups. There are intimate connections between the places we build and the places that we lose, and the memories in-between both.  

Even until this moment my professional life and career is shaped by my personal story and the experience of my own people. Over the last six months, 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza, who had already been displaced three, four, five times, were forced out of their homes because of an active genocide. As an architect, activist, and a worker in the built environment I carry the responsibility to resist and advocate for all oppressed people here in the U.S. and abroad; and, to educate designers and architects on the role of our work to either be part of the oppression people face or to be a tool for justice and equity.

Kotob: Hearing you talk about the ties to the land, especially when land is taken from you, creates a different experience than that of many of us who take our homes for granted. Sometimes you lose sight of the meaning of home. Thank you for expressing this nuance.

You’ve done so much in your career, what do you feel proudest of?  

Qawasma: I think any work I do that is rooted in justice, equity, and centering communities brings me joy. It gives me hope and makes me feel I’m helping. I think one moment I can proudly speak of is when I finished the infographic neighborhood book I designed for newly settled refugee families in the United States. After a few weeks I saw how people were using it, as an actual tool that people used and was giving them practical guideline to navigate through their new neighborhoods while still dealing with trauma and culture shock. Some told me they’d be walking down the street looking for the bus and didn’t remember how to do that and they’d open the book and figure out how to navigate and read signs.  

It brought tears to my eyes to learn of one elderly refugee couple from Syria, in particular, who were carrying the book and explaining things to other refugees and using the guide as something that was helpful to them.  

I want to emphasize again that architecture isn’t only designing and building structures; it is designing nurturing and healing spaces and experiences with the community. It’s anything we can put our hands on and do to imagine, build and create with others. As you said Jenine, we take a lot of things for granted.  We don’t look at the connection with the place we’re in and the families around us. We don’t think about how we step outside, and our eyes don’t need to adjust to what we’re seeing. For me, figuring out this was going to be my focus is my proudest moment.  

Kotob: We often talk about architecture being experienced through five senses. What you’re talking about is how this Syrian family came to the U.S., and they needed something they couldn’t verbalize. You were able to interpret that and meet them where they were and to provide them with something they needed. They didn’t even know what they needed. It’s beautiful that you can listen without them even needing to say anything.  

Tell me about your hopes for the future and for displaced people everywhere.  

Qawasma: To end displacement – and the way to do that is to end and eliminate the causes of it. When people are displaced by climate change, we need to address the root cause of the climate crisis. When they’re displaced because of wars or occupation, we need to end that cause for them to return and create their homes. It’s inhumane. Camps should be an emergency response to a disaster for a very short period of time until people return back home, not for years. It’s inhumane.

We need to ask ourselves how do people get to the point of being forcibly displaced; how can we stop that and what can we do to help them? Nobody chooses to be a refugee. No one chooses to be kicked out of their home. No one chooses to be displaced. Humans don’t lose their humanity after they’re being displaced, and they always have an amazing ability and strength to rebuild their lives. People are resilient. Whatever challenging place they’re put in, they look towards the future. They don’t stop working on how they can go back home. In the meantime they build, live and thrive where they are, even in a refugee camp. So, we need to understand that when you’re displaced it doesn’t take away your skills, your knowledge, and your wisdom. When people are displaced, they shouldn’t lose their place in society, and they should be supported to help create the communities that we want to live in.  

I believe it’s a disgrace to humanity to have people living in refugee camps for too many years, 50 years in the Western Sahara, 75 years in Palestine, 25 years in Sudan, 11 years in Syria, and many other places. This is on us. It’s on us to end the cause of their displacement, to build and rebuild with them, and to refuse to design unjust, unequitable spaces which can be used as tools of oppression.  

Kotob: It’s not just that we need to have hope for them. We need to learn from them, their strength and resiliency. That transformation needs to happen from everyone.  

Qawasma: Exactly, we need to understand that the switch between safely living in a place to becoming a refugee who is unhoused happens so quickly. We, as people who live in homes, don’t see it. When you’re healthy it’s hard to think about what it’s like to be sick. We need to understand that this isn’t a choice; nobody would choose to be on the street, but sometimes life takes you there. That shouldn’t take away your humanity.  

You can learn more about AIA’s Disaster Assistance Program online and join the AIA Resilience Network to make a difference today.