FMR 55 - Refugee settlements and sustainable planning

Flooding in 2010 affected 18 million people in Pakistan. With declining donor funds and flooding again in 2011 and 2012, the humanitarian community required low-cost solutions that could be scaled up.

All displaced people need some form of shelter, and circumstances dictate that in reality not much of it conforms to the typical picture of a tent or tarpaulin nor meets official standards.

We need to develop refugee settlement planning processes that not only facilitate long-term planning but also allow for incremental upgrading. The case of M’Bera in Mauritania illustrates this.

Current humanitarian guidelines do not sufficiently cover what shelter means in volatile and protracted conflict settings, particularly outside organised camps. We propose improved tools that will address that gap.

When challenged to investigate accommodation options for refugees in their city, architecture students found that there are simple and plausible architectural answers for the integration of refugees in medium-sized European cities such as A Coruña.

Most families recovering from the catastrophe of a disaster rebuild their own homes. This practice of self-recovery by non-displaced communities has potential for displaced populations too.

The architectural forms of emergency shelters and the ways they are created play a significant role in the ability of their inhabitants to deal with their displacement and to perhaps feel, even temporarily, at home.

Mass arrivals in Greece since 2015 have far exceeded the supply of acceptable shelter. The attempts to provide solutions continues.

Our research and development department has been working on a shelter solution in accordance with the requirement of improving logistics, installation, flexibility, the use of natural resources and, above all, the improvement of living conditions.

The developers of the Refugee Housing Unit know every aspect and component of their design but can never know what it is like to wake up in one of them every day.