Gimme Shelter:
Refugee Architecture in Germany
By Niklas Maak

Harvard Design Magazine

For the first half-hour of my visit to the German village of Manheim, I did not see a single person. Finally there was movement: someone appeared in front of one of the houses. It was Hussein Balo. Balo’s family had fled [Iraq] in three cars. Now his family—father, mother, seven sons, five sisters, their husbands and children—is housed in a German tenement building in a village that looks as if Germany itself had been abandoned by its former inhabitants.

The city in North Rhine-Westphalia was founded more than 1,100 years ago. There are farmyards, a neo-gothic church, and red-brown houses, their building stones stained with soot. More than 1,700 people once lived here, until the nearby surface mine edged up too closely to the village. It has long been known that Manheim would be sucked in by Europe’s biggest sinkhole, the Hambach mine, which at one point covered 8,500 hectares of land.

RWE Power AG, a giant in the German power industry, bought up the houses in Manheim. In a few years RWE will implement its “provisions for mining obligations”—another term for demolition. In 2012 the company started dismantling the town, “de-settling” it. Many residents took the company’s compensation money and built themselves new houses eight kilometers away in New Manheim. Old Manheim became a ghost town.

Then, in September 2014, refugees were placed in the abandoned houses in the nearby town of Kerpen. Soon after, RWE offered Manheim’s empty houses as housing as well. The rehousing started with 60 refugees; soon there will be a total of 400 people. The last time German villages were so full of life was before the Industrial Age.

Late in the evening the sky is still bright at the end of the street that leads out of the village toward the surface mine. The excavators stand in the sand like grazing dinosaurs, moving slowly forward, gobbling up the land. A few refugees come by to look at the hole. One man says it reminds him of the desert in Iraq— the distance, the emptiness, the sand.

Niklas Maak is a writer and arts editor at the Frankfurier Allgemeine Zeitung. He is the author of
Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach (2011) and Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New
Communal (2015).