The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
This ‘innovative’ refugee shelter can be assembled in four hours
The shelter comes in two boxes, along with the tools that someone would need to assemble it.
It can be put together in about four hours. It has a front door that can be locked. And a solar-powered wall.
This is Better Shelter, a project that was recently named the Beazley Design of the Year, an annual award given by the Design Museum in London.
The news of Better Shelter’s award, which showcases an innovation designed to help those who are displaced, comes as refugee and immigration issues come into focus in the United States and around the globe, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflicts in Syria and elsewhere.
The news came in the same week in which President Donald Trump signed executive order, called “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” to put a 120-day suspension on refugee admissions. During the presidential election campaign, Trump had called for “extreme vetting” of those who wanted to migrate to the United States.
Included in Trump’s executive order: “The Secretary of State shall suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days.”
In a news release, a judge for the design awards said that the flat-packed shelter “tackles one of the defining issues of the moment: providing shelter in an exceptional situation whether caused by violence and disaster.”
“Sadly, we have seen many instances recently where temporary shelter was necessary,” the judge, Jana Scholze, an associate professor at Kingston University, said in the release. “Providing not only a design but secure manufacture as well as distribution makes this project relevant and even optimistic.”
Scholze continued: “It shows the power of design to respond to the conditions we are in and transform them. Innovative, humanitarian and implemented, Better Shelter has everything that a Beazley Design of the Year should have.”
Better Shelter, which also won the architecture category of the awards, partners with the Ikea Foundation and the U.N. refugee agency, according to the organization’s website. Thousands of the shelters are in use around the world, the Design Museum said in a statement.
“We are above all pleased that this prize brings attention to our hard work, and as a result, the refugee situation as a whole. We accept this award with mixed emotions - while we are pleased that this kind of design is honored, we are aware that it has been developed in response to the humanitarian needs that have arisen as the result of the refugee crisis,” Johan Karlsson, initiator and interim managing director of Better Shelter, said in a news release.
Architectural Digest called the award “a striking example of how architec- ture can be used as a tool for humanitarian aid.” A report in the Guardian carried quotes from Hind and Saffa Hameed, who in 2015 moved to a refugee camp in Iraq. They had fled their home because of the Islamic State terrorist group, the Guardian reported, and “had never been so glad to see an Ikea product.” Via the newspaper: “If you compare life in the tents and life in these shelters, it’s a thousand times better,” Saffa, 34, told UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. “The tents are like a piece of clothing and they would always move. We lived without any privacy. It was so difficult.”
The Guardian reports that although the shelters cost more than tents, they provide some security and are more durable, holding together for “at least three years.” And that could be helpful now, as refugees face the grim prospect of staying in temporary living situations for longer periods.
CNN reported that Better Shelter units, which are large enough for a family of five, have been shipped to Iraq, Djibouti, Greece and Niger. They have been used not only as homes, but also as clinics, according to the network.
CNN reported that 16,000 of the structures have been shipped since production began in 2015; the Design Museum’s news release said 30,000 of the shelters were in use.