Shelter box: urgent architecture

Shelter Box: This compact emergency box was first deployed after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India. More than 100,000 have been used so far in 140 major disasters in more than 70 countries. 2.5 cubic feet, it contains a tent for 10 people, a children’s pack, thermal blankets, toolkit, stove and whatever is specifically needed for an emergency. Cost $1,000. Bridgette Meinhart. Urgent Architecture, WW Norton, 2013

Emergency housing has such a hold on the imagination, so wrapped up is it in development and dependency issues on one hand and on clever identi-kit solutions on the other.  I wrote a paper on the dependency side in 2004 for a conference organised at Ryerson by Robert Kronenberg on the transportable environment. The conference and the book from it tended to concentrate on technology: pop-up shelters, mobile pavilions, 3rd-generation walking cities, mechanical expandable structural systems – the extravagance of which I viewed in the context of Architecture for Humanity's 2001 competition for mobile clinics in Africa – for example, Ruimtelab and Linders & van Dorssen's project included a mobile phone as one of the most important tools in any kind of mobile environment. 

My point, at the time and probably still is, was that historically people subject to disasters swing into a kind of reclamation/restoration process immediately after the quake, or the bomb, or the flood: a response that we in the west generally do not understand. Here, trauma counsellors are first on the scene, something aid agencies extend to other cultures in other places.  They also bring in all the often hi-tech emergency shelters, they organise camps in straight lines, the newly homeless are detached from their land, their place, their property and their autonomy.  This is a critique of emergency shelter that dates from Ian Davis in the 1970s, that culture is left behind in aid agency panic to establish relief, rather than it being the organising factor. 

Nonetheless, flat pack dwellings are great fun to design: how small, how simple, how efficient and transportable can a house be?  One can be ingenious.  That there are millions of Chinese shipping containers pressed into service all over the world as housing isn't as much fun. 

Shelter Box: a box is delivered, clearly people are expected to interpret it, and then deploy it.  The tent probably does not require 6 burly World Vision volunteers to erect, the box could be thrown out of a plane and arrive intact.  Shelter is just a tool, not an object, despite its object/fetish nature.