Gimme Temporary Shelter - New York Times Magazine

GIMME TEMPORARY SHELTER

By SETH STEVENSON

After smart bombs needlepointed down onto government buildings in Baghdad, it became quite clear that our skill at destruction has reached unrivaled heights. At the same time, our skill at reconstruction remains rudimentary at best. A post-conflict (or post-disaster) refugee -- if he receives U.N. attention -- may be given only a blue plastic sheet, about 13 feet by 16 feet, which is meant to serve as a home. An entire family may live under one of these sheets for weeks, or months. A handful of architects have worked to improve this approach and to provide better housing for the temporarily displaced.
The other big name in emergency shelter -- an Iranian named Nader Khalili -- works with the shell structure of domes, vaults and apses. Khalili's work with temporary shelter has its roots on the face of the moon. In the mid-1980's, Khalili was one of a group of architects and engineers invited by NASA to offer new ideas for building lunar bases. Naming his technique Superadobe, Khalili suggested that astronauts carry up empty sacks, pack them full of lunar dust and then Velcro them together into a climbing, narrowing spiral. The end shape would look like a child's stacking-rings toy. When Khalili brought Superadobe back down to earth (he now runs an institute in California teaching the technique), he switched to standard sandbags -- or alternatively, long hollow tubes pumped full of sand. The idea is that your base material, be it moon dust or just plain dirt, is almost always right under your feet, wherever you are.
While Velcro might work for the moon, where there's no threat of hurricanes, on earth Khalili decided that four-point barbed wire was the best (and cheapest) option. The barbs act as a mortar between sandbag layers and grip with a tensile strength good enough to pass California seismic codes. The shelter's parabolic dome shape deflects rain and snow, its dirt walls provide excellent insulation and the form adapts to virtually any scale, from hut to warehouse.
''Sandbags and barbed-wire,'' Khalili says. ''The materials of war now used as shelter.'' In a post-conflict zone, he theorizes, the homeless could convert a battle's detritus into a new neighborhood. He even envisions some therapeutic value in the act. Refugees would require a bit of training and perhaps a few weeks' worth of labor.
Of course, all these ideas sound wonderful in concept. And the designers are heartbreakingly well intentioned. Yet with rare exceptions, these shelters almost never end up stretching over the head of a needy refugee. When I asked U.N. workers why all these concepts remain drawings on a shelf, instead of real improvements in refugee lives, the general response I got equated to: ''Uh-huh, sounds nice. We use tents.'' Indeed, thousands of tents. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees had stockpiled something near 100,000 tents in preparation for a post-conflict Iraq. As U.N workers see it, a crisis isn't time for cutesy theories, or lovely parabolic arches. It's a time for a quick, easy, on-hand solution that fits any situation. It's a time for tried, true and tested. In short, it's a time for tents. And maybe not even for that. Often, it's a time for a blue plastic sheet you prop up with a pair of sticks. Increasingly, the U.N. hands these out in lieu of tents.

The architects argue that architecture can offer better options, but the U.N. guys rarely get that far in the conversation. They're too busy making calculations: canvas, double-fly ridge tents cost $80; you can fit 350 of them, rolled up, on a Boeing 737; plastic sheets cost $6 apiece and use almost no space at all.
Several industrial designers have come up with prefab shelters for use in disasters. These are mass-produced, quick-assembly huts. One of the most promising models, called the Global Village Shelter, uses corrugated-cardboard walls, goes from zero to inhabitable in 15 to 20 minutes and costs $400. But it still won't turn many heads at the U.N. It's five times the price of a tent. Perhaps more important, the U.N. guys fear that the first time 200,000 families need instant shelter, such prefab units won't arrive on time and will take longer than advertised to assemble. That would mean first setting up a tent camp, then switching to a prefab camp after a day or two -- the U.N. hates multiple moves, as refugees relive the trauma of displacement. In Montenegro, one U.N. worker told me, they used prefab units. When the fixtures broke, they couldn't be replaced locally, and the whole thing had to be scrapped. Tents have been around for thousands of years, and the U.N. has used them since it first started handling refugees in post-World War II Germany. Institutional inertia is a powerful force.
''The U.N. is crying out for new options,'' Cameron Sinclair says. ''They can't live with risk, in such magnitudes of disaster, so they say, 'Let's buy tents.' But architects are problem solvers. The U.N. has actually been inspired by some of the designs from Architecture for Humanity, but the red tape gets in the way.'' That term -- ''red tape'' -- popped up in nearly every conversation I had with architects, including Nader Khalili, who has spent more than a decade meeting with the U.N., offering proposals and seeing almost nothing come of them.
One U.N. worker I spoke with readily admitted this: ''We don't really want to do better than tents for refugees,'' he said. ''If you improve on what they had before, there's less incentive to leave a host country and go back home.'' Here's the sad truth: the kind of prefab, fully plumbed and wired hut we might provide for a hurricane victim in Florida would be so unimaginably more luxurious than what a Rwandan refugee had ever known that it would, in fact, be culturally inappropriate -- an uncomfortable reality in itself. Seth Stevenson last wrote for the magazine about the sneaker wars.