# ‘Peace-kept’ urbanism: Ephemerality and endurance in eastern DRC

## TL;DR

This paper explores how temporary UN peacekeeping camps in Goma, DRC, shape urban spaces through overlapping temporal and spatial dynamics.

## Contribution

The paper introduces the concept of 'peace-kept' urbanism to analyze the interplay of ephemerality and endurance in peacekeeping-affected urban areas.

## Key findings

- Peacekeeping camps exhibit multiple temporal logics that influence urban development.
- The concept of 'peace-kept' urbanism captures the fluctuating nature of settlements under peacekeeping.
- Urbanism emerges through continuous re-making between the city and other spatial contexts.

## Abstract

This paper opens up and departs from United Nations peacekeeping camps in the city of Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, to grapple with questions around urbanism’s temporariness and permanence. Inspired by literature from southern urbanism and camp urbanism that focuses on temporal aspects of the built environment, I trace the various spatio-temporal horizons through which peacekeeping camps come in and out of being. Honing in on a particular moment of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that registers both its extendedness and acknowledgement of an eventual end, four empirical examples illustrate the overlapping temporal logics shaping the spaces of these contingent camps. I trace these logics in ways that can be analytically useful to understanding how urbanism emerges in the continuous re-making of human settlements between now and later, as well as between the city and elsewhere. In doing so, I develop the notion of ‘peace-kept’ urbanism to account for dwelling arrangements in places where there is peacekeeping, marked by both ephemerality and endurance and fluctuating in conjunction with multiple spatial and temporal horizons.