This article seeks to understand the significance of everyday beauty in refugees’ lives and its implications for refugee policy; it is one of the first pieces of scholarship to explore this subject in this context. A review of the existing literature on beauty in refugee contexts followed by a deductive analysis of the literature on refugee homemaking demonstrates how beauty and beautification play an active role in how refugees (re)make home, even in temporary situations. Beauty is used to build hope, celebrate culture, create community, and honour past and present realities, and therefore has significant implications for the objectives of the Global Compact on Refugees. The role of beauty in refugee homemaking suggests challenging the narrow focus on durable solutions to a more holistic framework, transforming language and policy approaches to include refugees as decision-makers, and investing in the quality of shelters, camps, and homes as a more effective way to reduce pressure on host countries.

Cet article vise à comprendre l’importance de la beauté quotidienne dans la vie des réfugiés et ses implications pour les politiques concernant les réfugiés. Il s’agit de l’une des premières études à explorer ce sujet dans ce contexte. Une revue de la littérature existante sur la beauté dans le contexte des réfugiés et une analyse déductive de la littérature sur l’établissement de domicile chez les réfugiés démontrent comment la beauté et l’embellissement jouent un rôle actif dans la manière dont les réfugiés (re)font domicile, même dans des situations temporaires. La beauté est utilisée pour donner de l’espoir, célébrer la culture, créer une communauté et honorer les réalités passées et présentes, et a donc des implications significatives pour les objectifs du Pacte mondial sur les réfugiés. Le rôle de la beauté dans l’établissement de domicile chez les réfugiés suggère de remettre en question la focalisation étroite sur les solutions durables au profit d’un cadre plus holistique, de transformer le langage et les approches politiques pour inclure les réfugiés en tant que décideurs, et d’investir dans la qualité des abris, des camps et des maisons comme moyen plus efficace de réduire la pression sur les pays d’accueil.

This article seeks to understand the significance of everyday beauty in refugees’ lives and the implications it could have for refugee policy. Beauty is conceptualized as the purposeful actions in, to, and through the built environment—what Danto (2003) establishes as “third realm beauty.” Third realm beauty is expressed through the deliberate modifying—beautifying—of the material world. Because this type of beautification occurs in the everyday and manifests in the physical dwellings of home, it is a relevant category of beauty to explore the daily realities of remaking home post-displacement (Neumark, 2013). The significance of beauty has long been recognized (Hamilton, 2021). As Danto (2003) has argued, while beauty might be optional for art, “it is not an option for life. It is a necessary condition for life as we would want to live it” (p. 160), and it is “not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human-life means” (p. 15). This article explores that claim in the context of refugees’ lives: Is beauty necessary for refugees? Is it a luxury only for those with permanent places to call home? If beauty is, in fact, central to the human experience, why does refugee1

policy overlook it?

While refugee numbers worldwide continue to grow at an unprecedented rate,2

countries have increasingly implemented containment policies to restrict refugees’ mobility and limit their protection (Brumat et al., 2022; UNHCR, 2018). The promoted policy solutions of repatriation, local integration, and resettlement have largely remained the same in concept and scope. As a result, they leave close to 80% of refugees “waiting” in “temporary” situations for anywhere from 5 to 20 years or longer (Donà, 2015; El Masri, 2020; UNHCR, n.d.c; USA for UNHCR, 2020). The global refugee regime3

“contains more examples of limitations than of successes and … [is] unable to reliably ensure protection and solutions” (Betts & Milner, 2019, p. 6) for the world’s increasing refugee population (Betts, 2010; Betts & Milner, 2019). Policy solutions for refugees, wherever they come from, are much needed.

The following analysis of how beauty might appear in refugees’ lives is positioned within the literature on refugee homemaking for two central reasons. First, with its focus on the lived experiences and practices of how, in this case, refugees build, conceptualize, and relate to “home,” homemaking provides an apt analytical backdrop to explore Danto’s claim that beauty is central to living. Second, home is central to both refugee studies and refugee policy (Brun & Lund, 2008; H. Taylor, 2013); indeed, “refugees are, in the crudest way, defined by the loss of home” (H. Taylor, 2013, p. 130). Homemaking thus provides a clear intersection between this article’s focus on beauty in refugees’ daily lives and its implications for policy.

Homemaking builds on a conceptualization of home that has multiple and profound meanings. Home can include the daily practices that take place in a dwelling or house, the emotional notions of being at home, and the legal rights of belonging to a homeland (Boccagni, 2017, 2022b; Fábos & Brun, 2015; Hammond, 2004; Mallett, 2004; H. Taylor, 2013). Its study is multidimensional (Mallett, 2004): it is material, spatial, temporal, and relational (Beeckmans et al., 2022; Boccagni, 2022b; Donà, 2015; Fábos, 2015; Massey, 1994; Pérez Murcia, 2020; Pérez Murcia & Boccagni, 2022; Ryan-Saha, 2015; H. Taylor, 2013; Walsh, 2006). For refugees, homemaking entails a losing and remaking in each of these different dimensions (Hammond, 2004; Korac, 2009; Pérez Murcia, 2020). Beyond the personal level, homemaking can be political (Beeckmans et al., 2022; Benson, 2022; Brun & Lund, 2008; Katz, 2022) and, for migrants specifically, transnational (Beeckmans et al., 2022, p. 15; Koptyaeva, 2017; Trapp, 2015; Walsh, 2006). Increasingly, “home” is more practice than place, more verb than noun (Boccagni, 2022b; Hammond, 2004; Pérez Murcia, 2020; S. Taylor, 2015). This rich, layered, and complex backdrop of home lends significance to understanding beauty’s role in this context.

To explore the possible impact of beauty on refugee policy, possible implications are anchored in the Global Compact on Refugees (the Compact) (United Nations [UN] General Assembly, 2018). Adopted in 2018 by nearly every nation in the world,4

the non-binding Compact, while not without its critiques, has been regarded as one of the most important policy instruments since the creation of modern-day5

refugee policy (Triggs & Wall, 2020). While policy-making happens at various levels of government and can take different forms, the Compact may be used as a proxy of international policy as an established representation of the collective global assumptions and aspirations of what refugee protection is and should be (McAdam, 2019; UN General Assembly, 2018). Proposed policy implications are targeted for the global refugee regime.

What follows begins with an outline of the methods used in this study. This study is centred on a sequential, two-part review of the literature: first a review of the existing literature on third realm beauty among refugees and then, in part two, a deductive analysis of the literature on refugee homemaking to identify if and what examples of third realm beauty exist therein. It then proceeds with a discussion of beauty’s possible implications for each of the Compact’s four objectives. While the explicit research on beauty in refugee contexts is scant, everyday beauty as expressed in, through, and onto the built environment is shown to potentially have an active and positive role in refugees’ lives. The implications of beauty range from the provocative to the conceptual frameworks of refugee policy to the practical in the administration of service delivery. Specifically, the examples of beauty identified in this review have the potential to (a) challenge the refugee regime’s insistence on durable solutions and its underlining framework, (b) transform the language used in refugee policy to align with its stated goals of increasing refugee self-sufficiency, and (c) indicate that valuing beauty in the built environment could ease pressure on host countries. The article concludes with a discussion on the limitations and challenges of this review, and additional research to advance understanding of beauty in refugee contexts is proposed.

A sequential study of the literature was used to explore the significance of beauty’s role in refugees’ lives and its implications for policy. First, to understand the state of the literature, a review was conducted for focused studies of third realm beauty among refugees (referred to as part one of the review). Fifteen key word combinations consisting of refugee(s), or asylum seeker(s), or forced migrant(s) or refugee, or internally displaced and beauty, or beautification, or beautiful were used to search for and review academic, peer-reviewed articles published in English since the year 2000. The search was limited to articles with a key word in the title or abstract. It should be noted that the focus on beauty in the everyday material world means that two categories commonly associated with beauty—physical appearance6

and art7

—are outside the scope of this review.

While the search initially yielded 51 results, only 8 articles focused on both beauty and refugee populations, and of those, only 3 focused on third realm beauty (see Appendix A: Table A1). The claims of beauty’s importance did not correlate to the available explicit scholarly literature on this topic. One explanation for this could be that beauty is/was present in refugee contexts, but attention has just not been paid to it. This seems plausible given the significant skepticism broadly held about beauty in scholarly research (Coleman & Figueroa, 2010; Marshall, 2013; M. T. Nguyen, 2011).

To test this, a deductive analysis of refugee homemaking literature was conducted (referred to as part two of the review) to identify if it contained examples that suggested beauty’s presence. To do this, first, literature on refugee homemaking was identified. Using the 10 key word combinations of refugee(s), or asylum seeker(s), or forced migrant(s), or forcibly displaced, or internally displaced and homemaking or meaning of home, academic articles published in English since the year 2000 with a key word appearing in either the title or abstract were searched and reviewed.

To detect whether the identified literature contained examples of beauty, a more detailed depiction of Danto’s (2003) third realm beauty was built by synthesizing the explorations of beauty by Boccagni (2022b), Mandoki (2016), Neumark (2013), and Rautio (2009) with the established definitions in the Britannica, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Three conditions were established of what would be classified as beauty for this review:

The qualities or actions are person-centred, ones possessed or taken by refugees; they do not refer to actions taken by entities or organizations, such as historically negative beautification campaigns in urban centres. The built environment refers to the material world and spatial and structural elements. The rationale for the three conditions is as follows. First, that beauty occurred in the built environment is an integral part of Danto’s (2003) third realm beauty. The other two conditions represent an aesthetic component as well as a moral one. Since this article explores the claim that beauty is important and positive, the conditions needed to account for both a material quality or action and some type of delight, pleasure, or positivity that was associated with that quality or action.

Each of the identified articles was reviewed for instances that met the three conditions. In any of the identified articles, any instance in which all three conditions were met was categorized as an example of beauty. If the same example was mentioned multiple times throughout the article, it was only categorized as one example. If the article contained distinct sections that met the conditions, each was categorized as a separate example.

The literature review on focused explorations of beauty in refugee contexts presents a mixed but intriguing picture of the role of beauty in refugees’ lives. The scholarly literature that specifically explores third realm beauty is extremely limited; three studies met the search criteria for part one of the review (see Appendix A: Table A2). However, the literature that does exist makes a strong case for the role of beauty in refugees’ lives, with examples demonstrating beauty’s role to heal, to empower, and to transform, as well as to connect to and improve the material world (see Appendix A: Table A3). Keyes & Kane’s (2004) study of Bosnian refugees resettled in the United States found that as refugees began to feel safe in their new homes, they felt a “restored ability to notice beauty” (p. 17). These authors’ focus was on understanding the mental health of refugees; thus, while this finding on beauty is not further expanded on, its ability to be appreciated was viewed as therapeutic. The two other included studies, Neumark (2013) and Marshall (2013), solely explored beauty in refugee contexts through participatory research with, respectively, resettled refugees to Canada and Palestinian youth living in the Balata refugee camp. Both studies find beauty to be active and transformative.

Marshall’s (2013) study found that Palestinian youth used beauty in a variety of ways. Youth saw beauty in how their homes were decorated and the care that went into maintaining them. Instead of seeing the physical proximity of the refugee camp as a problem, they saw the care and closeness of neighbours as beautiful. They planned ways to increase the physical beauty of the camp, and they used beauty to dream; one boy drew what his house would be like if it were outside the camp, by a river and among the fields. He stated, “Here you can see all the beautiful things … here you can breathe, there is freedom” (p. 66). Another child used the language of beauty to comment on political realities: “This is a map of good and evil. The ugly colours [emphasis added] represent corruption, the people … who violate the rights of the weak and poor … like the Israelis … do to us” (p. 64). For the children of the Balata camp, noticing beauty was a way of noticing and dreaming about life.

Neumark (2013) found that the simplest acts of beautifying space, “the ordering of a home, the sweeping of a floor, the placement of an object” (p. 238), were both practical and transformative. Home beautification served as a bridge for refugees to remember the “loss of their ideological homes” (p. 250) while also expressing a “readiness to make home anew” (p. 239). Resettled refugees used beauty to express the different socio-cultural and political dimensions of their lives and to grieve the trauma they experienced: “Through acts of home-beautification, the pain of the loss of home is intricately absorbed by and into aesthetic experience” (p. 249). It was a way to reimagine life; as one participant commented, “As refugees we lose our sense of beauty and when that happens, we lose our sense of everything, of life itself” (p. 242). For the participants in Neumark’s study, simple actions of home beautification had a profound role in remaking home.

Both Neumark and Marshall found beauty to be very active and important in refugees’ individual lives and communities. However, the scant scholarly literature raises the question of whether beauty is as important and ubiquitous as their studies—and Danto’s claims—suggest or if it has simply not been deemed worthy of exploration. Part two of the review explores this by identifying if beauty is present when it is searched for.

The search to identify refugee homemaking literature initially yielded 47 articles; 2 were excluded for being duplicative,8

which left a final sample of 45 articles. Of these 45 articles, more than half (26) included at least one example of beauty that met the three required conditions outlined above. In total, 41 specific examples of beauty were found in the refugee homemaking literature (see Appendix B: Table B1). The review found 27 examples of beautifying the built environment and 14 examples of how the built environment served as a container for beauty (see Appendix B: Table B2). These examples represented refugees from more than 30 countries with six different legal statuses (e.g., seeking asylum, granted asylum, “waiting” in a protracted refugee situation) who were living primarily in Europe or the Americas but also in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East/North Africa (see Appendix B: Table B2).

While occurring in different regions of the world and among refugees with different legal statuses, the examples of beauty found in part two of the review had common characteristics (see Appendix B: Table B3). The examples demonstrate refugees spending concerted energy to improve and beautify the structures they lived in and the space around them. Regardless of whether they were in a shelter, a camp, or a temporary apartment in a city, or if they had a more permanent place to call home, refugees painted walls, hung up pictures and wallpaper, carpeted floors, and invested time and effort in decorating and going to great lengths to find materials to do so (Brun, 2015; Kim & Smets, 2020; Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020; van Liempt & Miellet, 2021). Even in temporary dwellings, refugees’ cosmetic acts of beautification began in the first few days after their arrival and continued throughout their stay. These acts eventually became larger home improvements and transformations: roofs became gardens; porches became covered entryways for guests; sterile shelters became personalized homes (El Masri, 2020; Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020; Trapp, 2015; van Liempt & Miellet, 2021; Wagemann, 2017; Zibar et al., 2022). The examples demonstrate purposeful decisions and actions to the material world that were meaning-filled and delight-producing.

In addition to examples of beauty added or made to the built environment, there were also examples of beauty within the built environments in which refugees lived. Refugees used their physical spaces and the material world around them for sensorial and ornamental rituals associated with hosting, spirituality, and food: incense was burned, special tea and coffee was served in decorative porcelain sets, collective daily prayers took place on ornate mats (Donà, 1995, 2015; Fábos, 2015). Homes and shelters were rearranged to allow for sharing meals, celebrating holidays, hosting parties and dances, saying goodbyes, and having brief moments of respite from the struggles of daily life (Dudley, 2011; Gabiam, 2021; Gil Everaert, 2021; Koptyaeva, 2017; Mould, 2018; Pérez Murcia, 2020; Rottmann & Nimer, 2021; H. Taylor, 2009; van Liempt & Miellet, 2021). Refugees created symbols and pictures on street signs in their camp to create order and organization (Donà, 2015, p. 69). They adorned businesses with decorative banners and played music from shops and in the streets to reflect their various homelands while also creating a sense of collective community in their new albeit temporary homeland (Bauman, 2002). The physical space and structures were containers that enabled beauty and beautification to occur.

These various examples of beauty found in part two of the review, the analysis of the homemaking literature, echo the case made by Keyes and Kane, Marshall, and Neumark that everyday beauty matters. The review suggests that these examples of beauty and beautification in the built environment were profound. They were practical, proactive, and therapeutic. They were tangible ways of honouring past homes, expressing hope for future homes, and helping to (re-)create home in the here and now.

Building Home and Hope. Adjustments and additions even to temporary dwellings became key parts of refugees’ stories and how they built home again. Refugees exerted vision and agency in the process of infusing a space “with their own sense of identity and taste” (Boccagni, 2022a, p. 147) and “creating a spatially visible and felt sense of difference” (Hadjiyanni, 2009, p. 547). Simple things such as taking “great care with the decoration” were associated with refugees feeling both happy and secure (H. Taylor, 2009, p. 95). As van Emmerik (2021) describes, the experience of beautifying secured a “sense of self-reliance” (p. 214); it transformed the feeling of life “into concrete existence, where making [emphasis added] results directly in feeling a better life” (p. 219). Deliberate beautification of the built environment was not superficial.

Refugees exerted themselves as makers and creators. These acts, such as

Beautifying “enabled making plans for the future and having dreams about things to do at the place of displacement” (Brun, 2015, p. 49); this was represented both by refugees who chose to beautify their space and in the intentional act of deciding to not beautify a space—both were purposeful and seemingly an intentional way for refugees to demonstrate a focus on where they were headed (Boccagni, 2022a; Gil Everaert, 2021). Beautification was a way to exert agency.

Creating Community and Celebrating Culture. The spaces and structures refugees inhabited served as physical containers for collective expressions of beauty: culturally specific rituals of hospitality, celebration, and commemoration taking place to and within the built environment (DeRouen, 2019; Dudley, 2011; Gil Everaert, 2021; Koptyaeva, 2017; H. Taylor, 2009). These were ways of “connecting to a homeland [and] passing down one’s cultural traditions to future generations” (Hadjiyanni, 2009, p. 547), allowing refugees to cultivate “a private ethnic identity that grounded them in the face of the pressures of exile” (Fábos, 2015, p. 64). Further, these intentional acts of adornment strengthened friendships and “evoked a sense of community and joy … that [was] crucial to life” as a refugee (Rajan, 2022, p. 383). Aesthetic practices and actions in the built environment had positive ripple effects.

Honouring Past and Present. What might appear as simple cosmetics were in fact ways to express complex realities of past and present, of acceptance and hope. Through the acts of “establishing a garden, and making the house look nice, people made a place for themselves … and a home that connected with the memories of a past home” (Brun, 2015, p. 50). Refugees “replicated the decor of their homes left behind as a way of evoking the feeling of being at home in the new place” (Pérez Murcia, 2020, p. 473). Refugees used their homes and spaces for celebrations as a way to cope with the uncertainty of the present and as “a way for a community to bond around a shared history … of what was left behind” (H. Taylor, 2009, p. 201).

Beautifying even temporary structures created comfort and were a way to for refugees to endure in the face of displacement:

Refugees demonstrated an acceptance of their present temporary situation by using personal elements from their past. As refugees personalized “their units they could retrieve and fulfil a desire based on the ‘now’ and on ‘being’” (Zibar et al., 2022, p. 101). Temporary dwellings can cause all the other identities of “the displaced to disappear” (Brun, 2016, p. 436); their temporariness becomes their perceived identity. Acts of beautification, however, literally and figuratively allowed refugees to take up space in the here and now.

These examples of beauty found in part two of the review, the deductive analysis of refugee homemaking literature, were found in a little more than half (26) of the articles (45) that were reviewed. While that still leaves many articles (22) that did not contain an example that met the conditions to be classified as an example of beauty, the examples that were found represented refugees in all different legal and policy contexts: from migrants en route to seek asylum, to those who had been resettled to a third country, to those who had lived for decades in a “temporary” situation. While more research is needed, that even an initial exploration of the literature suggests that beauty and beautification are present and are positive aspects in refugees’ lives across such a range of contexts suggests that some precedent exists for those who seek to improve the protection of refugees to better understand it. Because if beauty is in fact an important part of refugees’ daily lives, let alone central and essential, as Danto broadly claims for all humankind, then it would behoove policies and services that aim to meet the essential needs of refugees to take that into consideration.

Policy implications from this review are anchored in the Compact’s objectives to ease pressure on host countries, increase refugee self-sufficiency, expand third-country solutions, and facilitate conditions for safe return (UN General Assembly, 2018, para. 7). The following describes how beauty could impact or improve each of them. It suggests challenging the narrow focus on durable solutions to a more holistic framework, transforming language and policy approaches to include refugees as decision-makers, and investing in the quality of shelters, camps, and homes as a more effective way to reduce pressure on host countries.

The global refugee regime has long viewed durable solutions as a key goal of refugee protection (UNHCR, 2006). These objectives spring from a framework centred on the nation-state where the “problem” is refugees’ lack of “homeland” and the “solution” is a new (or return to a previous) “homeland” (H. Taylor, 2013, p. 133). The strength of this underlying diagnosis is seen in the persistent pursuit of a strategy—as exemplified by two of the Compact’s four aims being allocated to this—that all evidence would suggest is not working.

The three historic durable solutions9

have not kept pace with the scale of forced displacement.10

There is ever-growing literature on the shortcomings of the durable solutions both in concept and execution (Addo, 2016; Ahmad, 2017; Crisp, 2003; Donà, 2015; Fábos & Brun, 2015; Hassel & Krause, 2016; Hyndman & Giles, 2011; Loescher & Milner, 2005; Milner, 2014; Mohee, 2021; Omata, 2013; Pressé & Thomson, 2008). The lack of durable solutions has made “waiting” in a “temporary situation” a “permanent norm” (Donà, 2015, p. 70) and creates a narrow definition of success, suggesting that little else matters until a solution is found (Fábos & Brun, 2015). Even policy-makers formally note the shortcomings, and nonetheless, the focus on durable solutions continues (UN General Assembly, 2016, para. 9).

Homemaking research has long pointed out how the policy narratives around durable solutions do not always align with refugees’ lived experiences (Donà, 2015; Fábos & Brun, 2015; Katz, 2022; Wagemann, 2017). While refugees are frequently described as simply waiting for a solution, the examples of beauty tell a different story. Refugees are not just waiting; they are painting, planting, and personalizing. They are gathering, sharing, and remembering. They are making beauty in and through the spaces and structures they find themselves in. If beauty for refugees is the “most immediately available arena of personal action, [it] cannot be dismissed as ‘merely’ decorative or superficial” (Neumark, 2013, p. 242). Instead, the importance of beauty in refugees’ lives adds to the growing critiques of a framework that narrowly defines what matters and only marginally represents refugees’ lived experiences.

A practical way to shift the durable solutions framework would be to rename them to describe what they are (e.g., legal rights to residence and protection) and not the impact they might have (e.g., a long-lasting resolution to a problem). Another avenue would be to gauge progress on a range of factors instead of having the only metric report on the dearth of annual durable solutions. A holistic dashboard that measures many areas of refugees’ lives, such as housing, health, education, work, and transportation, as well as legal rights to residence, would begin to create a more representative picture of refugees’ lives.

While refugee self-reliance has long been a stated goal, the Compact has elevated it. While the definition of self-reliance and the implementation to increase it vary, increasing attention has been paid to it in order to ensure that refugees do not depend on humanitarian aid in perpetuity (Clements et al., 2016; Fiori & Rigon, 2017; PHAPassociation, 2021; Skran & Easton-Calabria, 2020). However, an international policy document that aims to ensure that refugees can take care of themselves implies that they currently cannot. This imagery and language proliferate throughout policy and research. Displacement is viewed as a condition solely associated with loss, suffering, and anonymity (Beeckmans et al., 2022; Katz, 2022; Malkki, 1995; Marshall, 2013). The very label of being a refugee “implies a dependent role … [and] usually renders refugees powerless” (Korac, 2003, p. 409). Many have articulated the errors in this, demonstrating that on the contrary, refugees are “creative agents” (Katz, 2020, p. 236), not “passive beneficiaries of humanitarian aid” (Beeckmans et al., 2022, p. 16). This review, where beauty is evidenced as forward-moving, intentional, and planned, amplifies these arguments. The examples of beauty consisted of actions taken by refugees—that is, they included verbs describing what they were doing, not adjectives describing what had been done to them.

Beauty can help shift this long-standing discourse on loss and passivity. Noticing beauty in and through refugees’ lives (re)anchors their dignity and humanity, which is so often stripped as their existence becomes synonymous with the injustices they have experienced. Beauty helps to highlight how refugees are “changemakers” (Beeckmans et al., 2022, p. 16). And when someone is viewed as a changemaker, the language about them is never solely, if at all, focused on the “trauma” they have experienced, the “loss” that has occurred, and the “help they need” from those with means. If policy-makers’ aim is for refugees to be self-reliant, then policy language cannot simultaneously describe them both as a burden that host countries need to be alleviated of and as being able to care for themselves. The language used in policy, funding, and technical guidance should be strengths-based. This could include not requiring grant applications or funding reports to emphasize refugees’ needs and depravity but instead reporting on their skills and capacity.

Further, refugees’ agency needs to be recognized throughout policy processes, not just as an end goal. This historically has largely not been the case. During the historic 2016 New York Declaration, only two refugees were documented speaking at the multi-day international policy gathering about refugees (Triggs & Wall, 2020); in any other field, this level of representation would invalidate the gathering (Drozdowski & Yarnell, 2019; Global Refugee-Led Network & Asylum Access, n.d.). Funding refugee-led organizations is still a new initiative, not a norm of demonstrated trust (UNHCR, n.d.a). Refugee participation in policy-making has started to change, but it is still not a systematic policy response (Milner et al., 2022). At all levels of policy- and decision-making, refugees should play central roles in developing solutions and executing plans.

The lack of durable solutions has turned expected “temporary” stays in host countries to ones of extended duration. Historically, significant inequities have existed between the countries hosting the most refugees and the size of their economies (Acker, 2022; UNHCR, 2021). As a result, a small set of countries experience a disproportionate impact in hosting refugees, and they are typically countries that are already experiencing social and economic challenges (UNHCR, n.d.b).11

Nonetheless, stays in host countries are still expected to be temporary, and the Compact dictates that essential needs are to be the focus.

The examples of beauty in the literature, however, lead to questions about what counts as essential. Neumark (2013, p. 238) argues that beauty is not something that can be or is on hold for the millions of refugees who are waiting for durable solutions. The instances of beauty in the reviewed literature were not only employed by refugees who had a durable solution; many instances were found among refugees who were “temporarily” in shelters and camps in host countries. While beauty was not employed by all refugees, and at times was intentionally not used, it was not simply the temporariness of an arrangement that influenced whether beauty was or was not employed. While beauty might be perceived as important or plausible only after basic needs are met and permanent dwellings are secured, it appears to have utility even in the absence of these conditions.

Research has demonstrated the importance of beauty in the material environment, even in temporary situations. The impact when it is absent is seen in the shelters for asylum seekers in the Calais ‘Jungle’ in France and Hatch Hall in Ireland: refugees suffer from the “horrendous living conditions” (Katz, 2022, p. 158); endless security cameras, hallways that look like hospital corridors, and a lack of pictures and curtains had made the shelter “feel empty—even with the people in it” (Dreyer, 2022, p. 199). In contrast, the Banja Koviljača refugee centre in the former Yugoslavia has been described as the country’s most beautiful building, demonstrating that “creativity and beauty are possible, even necessary” (Staničić, 2022, pp. 189–190). The built environment has the power to hinder people or to help them.

While at face value many would agree that a lovely, more calming environment has benefits over a dark, damp, and dreary one, there are practical and political reasons why host countries do not want to or cannot provide beyond the essential needs12

and basic care prescribed in the Compact (Achilli et al., 2017; Ferris & Kirisci, 2016; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016). Shelters and camps have political implications, and demonstrating the “bare life” of those who stay in them creates an image that is “more manageable” (Malkki, 2002, pp. 353, 359). Further, not investing financially in these structures and/or policies that prevent refugees from decorating, personalizing, or improving them can feel like a way of reinforcing the temporary nature of the arrangement. While both Wagemann (2017) and Katz (2022) note how transforming a space and making a place feel homier—be it through ornamental plants and coloured fences or hanging pictures and curtains—can signify permanence, beauty and permanence should be unlinked. At minimum, it is misrepresentative, and at times offensive, to assume that refugees want their host country to be their permanent home (Achilli, 2015; Katz, 2022; Pérez, 2018). Further, a characteristic of beauty is its impermanence (Hamilton, 2021). Beauty does not last forever, but the literature suggests that it still matters. Refugees did not have to plan to stay somewhere forever for them to make it more beautiful.

While minimal arrangements might be more cost-effective in the short term and feel more palatable, if the goals are to ease pressure on host countries and increase refugees’ self-reliance, the research suggests, and this review underscores, that beauty in the built environment could help, not hinder, in achieving this. A therapeutic built environment can help people regain a “sense of normality” (Korac, 2009, p. 61) and become “self-sufficient and independent” (Pérez Murcia, 2020, p. 470). If policy-makers want refugees to be able to provide for themselves economically, then those refugees should also be able to decide if they can paint the walls of their room. Structures beyond basic shelters enable refugees “to re-establish their lives, even temporarily, in their precarious environments and realities” (Katz, 2020, pp. 236–237). Therapeutic physical environments are shown to increase unhoused individuals’ health, safety, well-being, stability, and focus on future goals, as well as decrease their need for long-term services (Colburn et al., 2022). If policy-makers want to ease pressure on host states, it is arguable that creating beauty in the built environment will be what helps refugees recover and move on, not what makes them settle down and require more.

There are shortcomings in this exploration of beauty and its potential policy implications. First, there is limited available scholarly literature that directly explores everyday beauty among refugees. The ubiquity of the words beauty and beautiful as adjectives for good made it difficult to expand the search criteria to non-peer-reviewed articles and/or grey literature that might demonstrate a more complete picture of work on this topic. Both parts of the review focused only on refugees, excluding other populations in which members might have similar homemaking experiences. For example, looking at the ways individuals experiencing homelessness, older adults in nursing care facilities, or those experiencing dementia use beauty in remaking home could be insightful. In the identified articles, refugee populations from the Middle East/North Africa and Asia and the Pacific who were living in Europe or the Americas were over-represented. Further, while the identified examples of beauty in part two met the conditions established for the deductive analysis, they were not labelled as beauty or beautiful by the study participants or authors themselves.

An overarching challenge to exploring beauty is that it does not fit neatly into an isolated category; by its nature, it is diffuse. What is labelled as beauty or beautiful is personal and perceived and could thus also go by other names. Looking at beauty within the multidimensional domain of homemaking literature further compounds this. Examples in the review that met the conditions for being classified as beauty could also fit into several other categories and distinct disciplines, including but not limited to placemaking, spatial appropriation, hospitality, agency, attachment, memory, objects, psychology, home repair, and community-building. Van Liempt & Staring’s (2021) study of Syrian refugees remaking home in the Netherlands is illustrative:

Here we see beauty to be a reason that a place has meaning, which allows for memories, materiality, and belonging and enables appropriation, which leads to agency. Perhaps more extensive studies of beauty must entail multidimensional frameworks and approaches similar to those called for in homemaking research (Mallett, 2004, p. 64). While beauty’s diffusion might subject it to criticism and render it difficult to study, it arguably also shows its power: beauty can be found anywhere, even in displacement.

In spite of the above-mentioned limitations and in light of rapidly growing numbers of refugees, stagnant solutions, and decreasing international protection, there is a strong justification that researchers and policy-makers should pay attention to anything that could have a positive impact in refugees’ lives. While there is insufficient research on beauty in refugee contexts to empirically understand its impact, this initial exploration of the literature points to it being something worthy of more in-depth analysis. Specifically, it should be analysis that leverages participatory methods—used by both Neumark and Marshall in their studies. Citing Maclure et al. (2010), Marshall argues that pursuing aesthetic and participatory methodologies allows for “a more open array of responses that are less burdened with the weight of prior assumptions, our own included [emphasis added]” (Marshall, 2013, p. 68). If there were ever an area where it was clear that our own prior assumptions were not working, the state of current refugee policy is certainly one.

Future research could focus on several areas. First, generating primary data to understand how refugees see, use, and value beauty in their own words is important. Adding to this would be understanding how perceptions and the use of everyday beauty evolve in refugees’ lives as they experience different legal contexts and physical places of dwelling. Exploring how practices of beauty and beautification differ between groups of refugees and understanding when and why some refugees employ and embrace beauty and beautification while some do not would be insightful. Further, it is important to explore in greater depth beauty’s intersections with other areas, such as placemaking, appropriation, and psychology, to determine how beauty is part of these important homemaking processes.

Beyond the personal expressions of beauty taken by refugees themselves, more research is also needed to understand how beauty in the built environment—such as conditions of shelters, camps, and reception centres—impacts refugees. For example, future studies can evaluate how refugees’ psychosocial well-being, economic outcomes, and health are impacted by intentional shelter designs, like Shigeru Ban’s curtain divider used in shelters for earthquake victims (Lasky, 2011; Pogrebin, 2014), or by policies that allow for refugees to personalize, beautify, or improve their space. Experimental designs could be employed: some examples include assessing the impact of giving some refugees freedom and/or funds to beautify or improve their spaces and comparing short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes of refugees staying in more aesthetic shelters and camps to refugees staying in “usual care” settings.

Last, this review highlights the importance of evaluating what counts as an essential need and implementing the proposal to test Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to understand if and where beauty fits on that hierarchy (Neumark, 2014). In many ways, Maslow’s hierarchy informs and justifies humanitarianism’s focus on “essential needs” and thus dictates funding and service structures, but Danto’s claim and the instances of beauty found in the literature across refugee contexts underscore the question of what is essential.

This article has sought to understand the claims of everyday beauty being essential. It has explored the role of beauty and beautification in refugees’ lives and specifically how it shows up spatially and structurally through actions taken on and within the built environment. The scholarly literature review presents a mixed picture on the role of beauty. That which directly explores third realm beauty in refugee contexts is limited, but the literature that does exist makes a strong case for it. The deductive analysis of part two of the review identified multiple examples of beauty embedded in refugees’ lives and ways that it positively impacted refugees in a range of contexts. This initial exploration highlighted several possible policy implications. It suggests questioning our conceptual policy frameworks to develop ones that more closely align with the lived experiences of refugees, as well as transforming the policy language we use to be strengths-based, focusing on refugees’ agency and skills and thus changing how we develop policies by including refugees in the process. Further, beauty has implications for how shelters and homes for refugees are designed and the policies that dictate how refugees can or cannot customize them.

The literature suggests that beauty serves as a meaning-filled, forward-looking, empowering practice through which refugees both honour past homes and (re)make home. While the current narrative about refugees focuses on their waiting and loss of home, examples of beauty in refugees’ lives are filled with action, intentionality, creativity, and care. The skepticism that surrounds beauty as an academic concept coupled with the refugee regime often being in a state of emergency, responding to one displacement crisis after another, could make it likely that beauty will remain overlooked in policy and research. But ignoring beauty and the ways that refugees express, embody, and practice it in their daily lives risks ignoring the wholeness of who they are. And when policies, and the research that informs them, do not reflect the whole story of a population, they cannot be effective.