Allison Loth_SOC328 Final Project

SOC328 DECEMBER 2020 ISSUE

THE REFUGEE CRISIS: How Architecture is RedeďŹ ning Temporary Housing Solutions Allison Loth

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The Refugee Crisis

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INTRODUCTION The role of architecture in society and the obligation designers have to this crisis.

THE ISSUE What caused Syrian refugees to ee their country and the concerns with temporary living communities today.

THE SOLUTION How designers are rethinking temporary structures and transforming refugee camps today.

SOURCES

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INTRODUCTION The impact that architects can make and the necessity that they act in the interest of those less fortunate.

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The Refugee Crisis

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he effect that architects have on society is far more extensive than many realize. All designers have an obligation to respond to current issues that our world faces, and let these encourage change within our practice. Regarding displaced persons, their role is even more prominent. The act of people moving from one nation to another is not a new concept, and while oftentimes takes place on a basis of individual persons, there are many instances in which large communities are forced from their home countries.

Although the creation of temporary housing for these non-citizens may seem simple or primitive, they actually serve as the foundation for future long-term cities. Therefore, the art of planning these communities – from the scale of urban design to landscape design and the form of individual dwellings – is absolutely crucial supporting the wellbeing of refugees.

Architects can visualize solutions that many people cannot begin to fathom. Without these creative minds, those within displaced communities will continue to be underserved. It is necessary that the profession explores ways to serve them, especially since climate change will likely increase the number of refugees in coming decades. This publication further explores the current refugee crisis and solutions that designers have begun to generate as a response.

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THE CRISIS The life of a refugee: what it means for their families, health, wellbeing, and sense of belonging within society.

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The Refugee Crisis

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t is critical that we first identify what it means to be a refugee.

At its basic definition, a refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their own country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. Today, the world is witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record.

In recent years, there has been an influx of Syrian refugees in particular. The crisis began back in March of 2011, when the government violently cracked down on public demonstrations that supported a group of teenagers arrested for anti-government graffiti. Although this originally took place in the town of Daraa, the violence continued to spread to various cities, forcing people to flee. Just two years later, over 1 million people had fled Syria and in total over 12 million Syrians are displaced.

The issue is still prominent even today, especially in the city of Idlib. Approximately 900,000 people have been uprooted from their homes since December of 2019. About 80% of these Syrians are women and children.

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“All the camps I have seen were all horrible, all gray” - Raul Pantaleo, architect

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WHERE REFUGEES LIVE NOW So where do these refugees live once they’ve fled their country? Some live in refugee camps, which are temporary cities with dwellings that typically consist of tents or shipping containers. Due to the major increase in number of displaced persons, these camps have become very overcrowded and many are forced to sleep outside in freezing temperatures.

On the other hand, over 90% of Syrian refugees now live in urban settings of surrounding countries including Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. Although they do not live in designated camps, these refugees still typically live in impoverished communities. In fact, over 60% of Syrian refugees live in poverty and continue to have insufficient access to employment, education, healthcare, and other basic services.

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GLOBALIZATION AND THE SYRIAN REFUGEE CRISIS Global analysts have become very concerned about the situation regarding refugees. With regards to globalization, when people move between countries, they are bringing their knowledge, rituals, and cultural practices with them. It creates this spread of information and culture that many see as a positive development among transnational relationships. However, the refugee crisis is a very different situation, for these people are being unwillingly forced from their homes. Rather than having the resources to contribute to that nation’s workforce, society sees them as “outsiders”, and they remain treated as such. They oftentimes do not receive what is referred to as “economic aid” from the government. It’s a “give and take” system, so the only way they can receive basic rights is to contribute to the country’s workforce and pay taxes. However, when you are denied proper education, opportunities for employment,

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healthcare, and freedom of movement, the idea of joining that country’s society is virtually impossible.

Some local governments even purposely leave refugees in bad conditions because they want them to go back to their own country.

In recent years, many countries have put limits on the number of refugees they can admit per year. The United States, for example, admits less than 100,000 refugees per year (quite limited compared to Turkey, Uganda, and Germany who have each taken in over 1.1 million refugees to date). The Syrian Refugee Crisis has truly revealed the inadequacies of our current institutional immigration arrangements. National preferences and biases have limited the aid that has been provided to millions of displaced people, making the end of this crisis nowhere in sight.

The Refugee Crisis

“The United Nations reports that 68.5 million people are currently displaced from their homes; this includes nearly 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of eighteen.” - ArchDaily

“Population movements are predicted to increase still further in future, with climate change expected to become a major driver forcing tens of millions of people to move.” - Dezeen

“1 person is forcibly displaced every 2 seconds as a result of conflict or persecution” -UN.org

“Children are sleeping in flooded fields with no running water or proper protection from the elements. We’ve provided blankets, heaters, and cash, but people have no money to buy fuel and have told us that they are now burning clothes and trash to keep warm,” -World Vision International President Andrew Morley.

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THE SOLUTION Current designs that are in the works and what we can expect in the coming decades.

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helter is a basic necessity for human life, but a sense of “home” is equally vital to our survival. When one is forced to leave their home, this feeling is damaged – and it continues to be as they live in worn down, temporary shelters. An architect’s role in society is to create spaces for human need, that is, a shelter, a place to receive medicine, the workplace, the market, etc. These structures combine to form the urban fabric of all communities in nations in varying stages of development.

Because the refugee crisis has become such a critical issue, it is now a prominent topic among architects as to how we must respond.

There are numerous key issues that must be addressed with current refugee camps, for they do not sustain communities and integrate people into new countries as they should. The overarching problem is that all camps are seen as temporary living situations, meant to be abandoned as people find permanent homes. Architects frequently overlook this problem and disregard the length of time with which people are being forced into these conditions. In reality, refugees have been exiled to such a degree that the average length of time for a stay in a displaced condition is 17 years (Architect Magazine). The director of the UN migration agency (IOM), Irit Katz said the current dwelling places provided for refugees are, “just good enough to keep them alive in a miserable twilight of halfexistence. Instead they must also give people an opportunity to develop, to be healthy, to learn [and] to create rich environments of everyday life”.

The solution to this crisis are structures and sites that have the following criteria: • respond to the specific cultural practices of its inhabitants • are built of materials that are sustainable, long-lasting, and can survive in the climate its built in • have spaces that are conducive to numerous uses (cooking, sleeping, schooling, growing produce, etc.)

• have lots of gardens and greenspace for growing food • a creative use of color that can impact our subconscious • can be built with ease and in a short time frame if needed • are designed to be beautiful and give people pride to live in December 2020

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Pictured above is the Refugee Housing Unit (RHU), also known as the Better Shelter, developed by a small Swedish design company and manufactured by Ikea. This plastic house is 188 square feet and comes with four windows, two ventilation hatches, a photovoltaic lighting source, and a USB port for charging capabilities. They can accommodate a family of five and last for three years, selling for $1,150. Although they are fairly sustainable and can be assembled with a minimum amount of skill, this project revealed a number of faults in how we design for refugees. For example, the design team realized that different cultures have different opinions about how shelters should be configured. The placement of the door at the far end of the unit offered anyone who entered a full view of the interior. However, this is unacceptable among Muslim refugees, who prefer that women are more hidden. (Dezeen) They concluded that design needs to be more adaptable and flexible – and most importantly, change depending on the specific needs of the people it serves. The fact of the matter is, there is no one solution or singular design that will solve this issue. It will take a large number of passionate, skilled designers to ensure that refugees are treated not as outcasts, but as human beings.

The following page shows a number of successful projects that address how structures can better serve communities, beyond just individual dwellings.

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The Refugee Crisis

“ ‘Camp’ is kind of a misnomer. It already labels it as a second-class place and these places should be thought of as cities.”

- Don Weinreich, FAIA

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Maidan Tent / Bonaventura Visconti di Modrone + Leo Bettini Oberkalmsteiner Designed in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, this social hub creates an indoor public space for refugees at a camp in Ritsona, Greece. The communal area counteracts the psychological trauma induced by war, persecution, and forced migration.

The Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers / Yoav Meiri Architects This library is located in a public park in Tel Aviv, Israel, where migrant workers congregate on weekends. The structure is designed to have no walls or doors–a conscious decision to ensure free and equitable access to the library’s collection of 3,500 books.

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The Refugee Crisis

Floating Schools in Bangladesh / Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha In response to rising sea levels in Bangladesh, this ďŹ rm is moving schools and community centers onto traditional boats. During the day, the boats host classes for children and training sessions for adults; after sunset, families are free to use the boats to continue work or educational activities.

Playgrounds for Refugee Children in Bar Elias, Lebanon / CatalyticAction In an effort to address issues of psychological trauma and to ensure healthy development, this school playground provides a safe space for refugee children to play and rest–a space of security in a vulnerable environment.

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Humanitarian expert, Kilian Kleinschmidt in an interview entitiled “Good Design for a Bad World” with Dezeen regarding the refugee crisis. full discussion: https://youtu.be/Qy-1vB3Xob4

What we want to discuss today is what is the refugee crisis, that is, what it should be called. Why are people moving on mass between different countries. Are there design ways of stopping that from happening or alternatively are there better ways of integrating refugees into our existing cities?

I have been working for the United Nations over the past 25 years so I’ve been setting up refugee camps storage facilities for people over the years. My first refugee camp I set up in 1992 in Kenya Kakuma camp still exists. What I have been working on over the last three years since I decided to quit the UN is to actually realize for myself that our storytelling about refugees is completely wrong - that our narrative is wrong.

We need to fundamentally change the way we look at the phenomenon of displacement and that will help us start seeing refugees as actual human beings. We all have been refugees in our history, our families have been refugees. Displacement has been a fact in in our life.

The logic that refugees displacement is something temporary has created this canvas, however, that one is the result of urbanization of a camp.

Millions were displaced in Europe and we had a tendency of categorizing people into the good refugee running away from war and persecution, 15

and the bad one who is only running away from poverty exploitation, slavery bonded labor, and of course increasing climate change. So, if we look into people on the move at large it is not the few people we count under the Refugee Convention.

If you look at it as we should, it is 1 billion people currently in the world living in unsafe conditions.

Living in ways where they don’t have a real stable environment and that is in fact our challenge we have to address.

We are sort of surprised by it all the time and that we have to make these makeshift solutions time and again.

Why are we not prepared to deal with this with these flows of people coming in and out? What does this have to do with planning our cities?

It has a lot to do with spatial affairs, especially if you look at the places where asylum seekers or newcomers are actually housed in our country. So, the Netherlands and Germany and completely outside of the areas where the work and economic possibilities. People are housed with the idea of them being given chances to integrate, to get work, to get economic prosperity. But, spatially they are prevented to do so, so there is absolutely a spatial question connected to this refugee problem. The main question that interested us is The Refugee Crisis

how can architecture and design make our cities more adaptive? We’re also looking into what are the specific solutions that designers and architects, but also policy designers do to make this flow of migration go smoothly into our cities and will this end up in handbooks and guidelines?

Have you drawn any conclusions about how can we make our cities more flexible?

Well what we are looking into is building typology and planning solutions for not only for buildings, but also public space. We’re creating different kinds of housing where different groups of migrants and, for instance, students come together and share space. This therefore sort of

eases the integration of groups. The element of architectural quality I think is important because what you see is often that migrant housing is temporary housing and very low quality. The container housing of course is sort of a makeshift solution to this housing, so I think in that sense, quality is something to aspire to.

Refugees are not a new thing - it’s a permanent phenomenon you mentioned, but why does it always take us by surprise and why do we think of it as something exceptional and that we can’t really as a society seem to understand?

I think that’s very important that you can look at very sophisticated solutions, but there are

“We need to fundamentally change the way we look at the phenomenon of displacement and that will help us start seeing refugees as actual human beings. We all have been refugees in our history, our families have been refugees. Displacement has been a fact in in our life.”

dumb and very effective solutions like affordable housing. Both in Iraq but also in the Netherlands we used to have a tradition in which affordable housing was abundant and was a state policy.

Of course this has diminished greatly the last few years and I think that is also one of the reasons that during the Kosovo crisis, we didn’t have any housing problems but now we have many because of the how social housing stock has been sold off. The absorption capacity of say Dutch cities is way less than it was 20 years ago. And that’s not because of a change in the number of housing, it’s a change in the ownership of these structures.

I was intrigued by your point earlier about how the education system doesn’t allow for new areas of exploration. Talk a bit more about how if we were able to design new university courses, what would they be and how would they work well?

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I’m right in the middle of starting a new school actually, especially for this reason because I think the university systems have become so rigid that they have become incapable of dealing with the immediate and actual questions that are out there. Especially in this in this topic, I think it’s very important to just look what is happening – to have a flexible and short term response to questions put before us in order to be relevant. I think a small school and any small Academy would be better suited for this than the big universities.

We need to look at how systems can be accessed – how they can be scaled up, how financial means can be organized, and how services can be accessed on a larger scale. Instead of coming up with a few products or something that can be made in a different country and shipped to these countries in need, how can products be made in their own country and on a wider scale?

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SOURCES VIDEOS Dezeen Interview: Dutch Design Week https://youtu.be/Qy-1vB3Xob4 About Syrian Refugee Camps https://youtu.be/vjALr04Ll18

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The Refugee Crisis

PHOTOS https://mediad.publicbroadcasting. net/p/shared/npr/styles/x_large/nprshared/201805/400199652.jpg

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5d0b/6c29/284d/d1bd/8700/00ee/slideshow/%C2%A9_Y.Meiri__(3).jpg?1561029668

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/syrian-refugees-turkey-2.jpg

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5d0b/6c14/284d/d1bd/8700/00ed/slideshow/Courtesy_of_CatalyticAction_(2)_(1). jpg?1561029646

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/ img/posts/RTR3BVT5.jpg https://www.newstatesman.com/sites/ default/files/styles/cropped_article_image/public/blogs_2017/07/gettyimages-462993601.jpg?itok=h8KokygL https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/refugee_tents_turkey001.jpg https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/ resize/my_image_big/6eef7112150d83767401f6e8a8fc81d887db6a04.jpeg

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5d0b/6c1f/284d/d1f3/f300/0008/ slideshow/%C2%A9_Filippo_Bolognese. jpg?1561029657 https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5d0b/6c3d/284d/d1f3/f300/0009/slideshow/ Courtesy_of_Shidhulai_Swanirvar_Sangstha_(3). jpg?1561029689 https://cdnassets.hw.net/dims4/

TEXT https://www.archdaily.com/919496/beyond-refugee-housing-5-examples-of-social-infrastructure-for-displaced-people https://www.dezeen.com/2017/12/18/ dont-design-shelter-refugees-kilian-kleinschmidtrene-boer-good-design-bad-world/ https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/ rethinking-the-refugee-camp_o

https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ refugees/ https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories/syrian-refugee-crisis-facts https://www.unrefugees.org/news/syria-refugee-crisis-explained/#:~:text=The%20Syrian%20 refugee%20crisis%20is,increased%2C%20families%20began%20to%20flee.

https://www.infomigrants.net/en/ post/17921/design-for-refugees-when-does-ashelter-become-a-home https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-aglance.html

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DECEMBER 2020 ISSUE