Refugee camps around the world emerge as aid landscapes intended to provide temporary emergency settlements and other basic needs to people who are fleeing conflict in their home region. However, despite the term “temporary,” many camps endure for decades where inhabitants find themselves facing a protracted state of ‘bare life’, experiencing isolation from the rest of society, and are often treated as humanitarian subjects and aid recipients for generations. While refugee camps and settlements are created according to site planning guidelines outlined in emergency response handbooks and manuals, refugees face the challenge of recreating their lives socially and spatially, actively reforming their identity. Based on the narratives and experiences of refugees in the Zaatari camp of Syrians in Jordan, this chapter presents a novel approach to studying the informal self-led and needs-based re-creation of refugee shelters using an analytical shape grammar. The grammar offers a systematic framework to analyze and generate spatial configurations of shelters based on identified rules and constraints. Through field observations, in-depth interviews with camp residents, and documentation of shelter layouts and conditions, the research examines a corpus of twenty-two shelters that have undergone gradual transformations by their inhabitants over ten years. A comprehensive analytical shape grammar identifies recurring patterns, evaluates functionality, and uses human-centered patterns for generating spatial structures to enhance the living conditions of refugees. The grammar encodes the conventions of existing modes of spatial generation and introduces new conventions that can be used to explore novel spatial arrangements that meet resident needs.