Vaissnavi Shukl
The very step. Episode of our podcast focused on the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh and highlighted the role of designers in alleviating the living conditions of the refugees. Today, we have almost come full circle as we speak to Better Shelter, a non-profit organization based out of Sweden that works towards providing safe and dignified shelters to displaced people around the world, with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Parts, we speak to Märta and Miguel from Better Shelter about working in crisis situations, how their shelters culturally adapt to specific contexts, and how to navigate the logistical challenges of deploying in disaster zones.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

I think we should start with the first big idea, the question of why has Better Shelter focused on temporary shelters rather than permanent solutions? And since you both have been working on it for a while, what are some of the considerations that go into deciding the type of shelter for different regions, different contexts? And if you could speak a little bit about the kind of crisis situations that you work in.

Märta Terne
In order to better explain why we do what we do, we have to talk a little bit about the context we operate in first. And no one should have to live in a refugee camp or any complex situation for a long time a refugee camp is it’s not often dignified, nor is it safe, and a lot of camps lack what we regard as basic standards and very rarely address all the needs that a human being has to live a good and fulfilling life. We operate a lot of refugee camps, and it is also the final resort for UN organizations and states and authorities when a lot of people come over a border at the same time and a lot of people need basic safety urgently, basically. And if you look at the average protracted refugee situation that is about 20 years more or less, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people live in camps for this amount of time, but they do live in camps for many years. And in the spring I visited, for example, a camp in Chad for Sudanese refugees who had fled the Darfur crisis, crisis in 2003 so that camp had been around for 21 years, and they were not looking to go back anytime soon, if you know what’s going on in Sudan. Now, the same thing in Palestine, of course. I visited camps there as well that were established eight years ago. But that said, camps can look very different, and a camp in eastern Chad is very different from a camp in the West Bank, for example. So and then just a bit about the numbers, and then we will get into what we do and why we do it, but there are now 38 million refugees in the world, more or less than a minority. Around 1/5 or so of the world refugee population live in camps. That’s a minority, but it’s still around 8 million people. That’s a country that’s almost the size of Sweden, that lives in refugee camps. Many live in planned and managed camps, but around two or so million of these refugees also live in sub settled camps, so those without formal management by authorities, for example. And on top of this, we also have 75 or so million internally displaced people. So people that are displaced within the borders of their own country, these population populations are much harder to keep a track of, but we know that many millions of them also live in camps. And it’s for many reasons, a life on hold. It’s also, I mean, I’ve heard people comparing it to life in prison, you know, an outdoor prison. And I think when I interview people, when I live in our shelters, and you ask them, like, how is this shelter to live in? What can be improved and so on? I often hear that, you know, “This shelter is the least of my problems. You know, I don’t have enough food. We don’t have the medicine we need. I can’t work. I can’t make a living for myself. My children can’t go to school. We can’t go back to where we came from, and if we leave where, where would we go?” One of the main problems living in refugee camps above, one of the things that I just listed, is the uncertainty, you know, not knowing for how long you’re going to be there. And humans are very bad at dealing with uncertainty. If you would know that there’s an end to this end year so and so, I think life would be a bit more bearable for these people. But with all of this said, of course, you escaped death by coming to a refugee camp lightly. So for many people, this is safer from what they fled from. You know, we see Gaza on TV these days, and this is what people, many times, flee from. So of course, you would rather be in a refugee camp where there is safety and not bones falling on your head, and you have access to health care, and your children can sleep quite safely at night, but it’s still not somewhere you would have to live in for many years. But this is reality, so sort of that’s the background to why we build temporary shelters rather than permanent ones.

Miguel Eulate
So in this context we are having these first budget constraints, because the needs are huge, the public money, no, they’re from the main donors. It has been decreasing every year the last least four years, so it is not matching the budget and the needs. And then also, we are having this legal constraint like that. When you are setting up a refugee camp, it is something temporary. So no, it is something built in that way, because it is so uncertain the future, the local, host country, government, they are not going they don’t know how many years the people is going to be there, so they cannot build on the year or so sometimes, because political will, in other hand, because the the lack of funding and resources, it is not building that way. So this is a frame where we are working, and then we have to do is, again, the shelters temporary, actually, because they should be cheap, accessible, and then they should be not too permanent. In many contexts, because it will be against the local framework. So you cannot build, actually, it is called relief housing units, not one of the main shelters. But in some contexts, they change the name in order to be able to propose it to the local authorities, and it is all temporary center units like the TSU, because they want to avoid the term housing. This is a big constraint that we are facing as well. That’s why we are working mainly in a temporary center. But also, as we know that many crises are going to last for so many years, still, they should be temporary. No, they have to be easy to disassemble and to be removed. But they should last some years. At least. We are focusing, like minimum, 10 years to have a center there in order to provide some safety

Vaissnavi Shukl
The factor of time is so important here, and the role of time is almost two fold. So once, of course, the time that it takes for one to erect this particular shelter, because it has to be done fairly quickly, because you don’t know whether it’s a natural crisis, whether it’s an earthquake or a tsunami, or if it’s a political crisis, or if it’s a war zone, the amount that you get to deploy this shelter is fairly limited. Has to be done really quickly. The second aspect of time, I guess, in this context, when we’re talking about temporary and permanent, is also that 20 years, or 21 years, you just mentioned Märta, it’s a really long time to be living in a shelter. And from historical instances, at least in India, we’ve seen in Delhi, there’s a particular area which was actually set up as a refugee camp after the 1947 partition. So during the independence, when some mass exodus of, you know, Muslims going to Pakistan and Hindus coming back to India, and there was an entire area which, which started as a refugee camp, and then, because of this factor of time, it stayed on for so many years, it almost became a permanent fixture in a city, right? So you don’t really have a control over how, how long or short that that camp is going to be there, and you know whether it’s actually ever even going to get formalized into some kind of a settlement or some kind of a housing now, if I mean, I’ll link, of course, in the show notes, the Better Shelter website, and you have a wonderful radio explain how the shelter is erected. It comes as a kit of parts, and you put it together. And when we were initially talking about this, you did mention that there’s an, I mean, it’s evident to see it’s a wonderfully designed mechanism, very precise, very easy to put up together. There’s always a concern that these shelters are so good if they’re providing better quality of life than the ones that people had lived in before a certain crisis. Of course, there’s a feeling of home, because a home is much more than the space you live in. You know, it’s your family, it’s your history, it’s all the stories that have been told in that place. But do you think there’s ever a risk that such immaculately designed shelters might attract more refugees or displaced people because of the conditions that they provide. And how do you really balance the need to, on one hand, offer dignified living conditions, and then on the second without making this into some kind of housing crisis by the number of people attracted to this place because of some kind of shelter or amenities, more than what you are actually doing.

Märta Terne
The short answer, of course, there, there are different answers, but I don’t think a nice a nice shelter will ever be enough to force people to leave their their homes, if it’s safe enough to return or move somewhere where life is happening, a planned city where you’re part of society, people will always choose that, of course. And I mean, as Miguel, you touched upon a bit before, our mission is to deliver something that is as comfortable and as safe as possible, while being temporary, while lasting for as long as possible, and be as low cost as possible and possible to implement in far to reach regions. It’s a, I mean, it’s a very impossible brief, right? It has to be low cost, low volume when you ship, but become big when you build it, and you should be able to build it within a few hours. It has to weigh as little as possible. It has to be scalable, but also be culturally. It has to provide safety and comfort and be rain proof and snow proof and windproof, and when not needed anymore, be fully recyclable and aware of the world. It is a very difficult brief. And I think what we’ve come up with is something that is trying to address all of those criteria. And I saw recently, I checked the shelter budget for the Syria response this year has been funded by 19% so in a lot of operations where people organizations have a few dollars per person or per family even, which means they will end up with per Pollin and a few sticks, and they make something makeshift from themselves. I’ve seen a lot of a lot of examples of that in many parts of the world, and in Syria, for example, in northwest Syria, where we work in where there are millions of internally desist people, and really rough winters, snow and minus degrees for many months, people live like this year after year after year. So it’s not the shelter itself that will attract people. It’s something else.

Miguel Eulate
I’ve been working in different operations, sometimes in and so on, and I have the feeling that always, based on my experience when I was working in this operation, like people, they are moving, not because the quality of the center now they are triggered by other reasons, and at the end, as the budget is so low for the amount of people that you want to support, I was working in 2022 in Pakistan for the flood response, and you have hundreds of 1000s of people, and it’s really hard to support all of them. You are not going to do it. So you have to prioritize the vulnerable target groups and so on. But at the end of the day, every shelter comes, not every shelter, each family, counts. That’s the way you can handle it. When you see that it is not proportional to the resource that you have and the need that you find.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What I also found interesting was on your website, and you see these shelters being deployed across different weather conditions, across different geographical conditions. In a way, it was comforting to see people make this shelter into their own, you know, adding nuances of their tradition, their history, their culture. I was wondering if you have any anecdotes, or if you have any stories about how through this shelter, people have been able to bring in their own cultural history, whether it is with tribal or indigenous communities or even people, maybe who’ve been used to living in a larger city and then now moving into these shelters. How do you really work in this context? How have you seen people adapt themselves into what is this temporary housing situation?

Miguel Eulate
No, that’s true. This is something that I’m enjoying a lot when you are traveling, because at the end, although we are having two kind of centers that they are produced in the same way, always, they looks the same when they are in their warehouse, but when they are in the field, you can tell, as you were saying, that they are so customized by the people, no one. And I love when you can tell that they are taking ownership of the space and they are adapted. And I think that they are really interesting, because our center will deploy in many countries, and when I have the chance to visit some of the implementation programs, for instance, regarding privacy, this is a topic that we understand all of us, but for each of us, it has a different perception. So we are facing it from a different angle. So for instance, in the crisis in Venezuela now, there are many people who came into Brazil to the north of Brazil, and they have all small operations, and they are hosting a lot of refugees. And they identified areas, okay, the needs of the population are not the same, and they target the indigenous people. So they assemble the same shelters in a different way. So they are building shelters with a higher sea roof. So they were combining them like in two, because they need an extra internal structure to have hammocks. Because they are in the nurse community, they prefer to sleep in hammocks, no matter what. So they need some extra space and also it’s really nice, because as you have a higher ceiling, the thermal comfort of the center is performing better. But then, even when we were there, like last year, I had the opportunity to talk to some indigenous nurse ladies, they were saying, and it was super cool. You’re like, “Hey, how was your home? What Did it looked like when you were still living in still in Venezuela? How is it looking?” And it’s like, “Oh no, we have, like, a beautiful roof, very thick makeup countries, and it was really refreshing and so on. And we were, like, in a plane, so we were safe, so we didn’t have any issues with the floods or anything”. And we were talking a little bit, and then at some point I said, “What is the material of the board? Like walls?” There’s no walls. We want to take the maximum of the, you know, as much as possible, the breeze, the wind that we it’s closing our centers, our houses, because it’s so hot in the rainforest. So there is no point to having, you know. And we are having the hammock, so everything is kind of clean and open. Of course, I guess that they have some limits. Maybe the communities are smaller, or maybe they know the boundaries. So, I used to go across this line. Or maybe you have, like, some partition, but you don’t have a close building, close volume. But when you talk to people that are working in IDP camps, internally displaced people come inside Syria, the perception of privacy is completely different. So they assemble two shelters for one family with a toilet in the middle, and then it has a U-shaped courtyard, and then they close it with a fence, because they prefer to enjoy the sky, but they have their own space inside, so you can tell the difference. So yeah, it’s really nice to have this contrast, not from so yeah, it is the same filter, because here we are talking about the center with everything in a box, with the roof and the walls as well. But you can tell the difference, no like how they customize. And when we see that they are talking when they are putting the diploma over the drawing of the children, or maybe a mirror not just to fix your hair before going out. So this is how we love to see. They are using the shelters, and they are customizing.

Märta Terne
Yes, and treating it like you can see the difference between a tent and our shelters. It has walls so you treat it like a house. Everyone who lives in our shelters knows it’s not a permanent building. When you’re in it. Do you know that? Nobody’s going to be fooled by that, but it’s still that there are walls that you can hang you can it still resembles something closer to a house.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I thought it was interesting to see the spatial interpretation of one’s religious identity into these shifts. Because, you know, for example, in more conservative Muslim families, there might have to be more divisions between the men and women of the house. You know, when it comes to prayer time or grooming time. Similarly, at a slightly larger communal level, also, you would find women kind of congregating in a different way than men who would want to sit outside and, you know, have their shisha or have their or have their coffee. So even when looking at the shelters from that perspective, you know, where that one man is making his coffee or tea, just bringing their own culinary traditions or their religious identities and adapting the shelters. Of course, they are all the same throughout but then the adaptability of it was very interesting. Now, since Marta you mentioned you’ve been to Palestine, and you’ve been to all these different sites and countries where you are deploying better shelters. What would a typical process of deploying these shelters look like? How does one start? Can you walk us through the logistical challenges of how you enter? Is it through a UN government agency? Is it through local governments? Is it self initiated? What is the mode of engagement and the back end? I would love to know how you guys coordinate it, you know, with the team, and what are the kind of roles people have? Of course, shipping is the easier part. But then, you know, who, who oversees, okay, maybe not, maybe not. But then who teaches people to, you know, read the kit of parts, or who takes over the site execution for it? So if you can just talk about the overall cycle.

Märta Terne
Maybe you want to start Miguel because you’re so, so deep into training our colleagues in the other organizations and so on. But partnership is key. We’re not the ones that decide where the shelters go. That’s our local partners..

Miguel Eulate
Exactly. So that’s them, I will say, like the most important thing that we have. So at the end, when you are deciding the shelter situation, we are setting options, but the decision makers are the people close to the field. And this is really important to have this, like when you are having this first conversation, to see, oh, it is, it is a fit or it is not. You can have potential here or not. This is something that we discuss together, and we try to have, like, an open discussion. And also when it comes to the implementation itself, how they assemble in every box, you have Assembly manners like they look like the IKEA ones, and without text, it is only drawings and so on. But still, we want to make sure that everything is done properly, so that not the quality is there. So we also provide technical support online. This is something that we find a challenge actually, when to reach people that on the ground do not like how to be able to have access to the people that they are really assembling the center is something that not always is easy, because we are working with our organization most of the time. They are very big, and it’s hard to go through all the layers and be able to read the graph.

Märta Terne
This is something that, yeah, we work with a lot of the big UN agencies, UNHCR, historically, the UN Refugee Agency we’ve partnered with over many years, and they were also developing the shelter together with us under UNHCR innovation. So we get requests from these organizations. It can be UNHCR or the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies that we’ve worked with in several countries, and as Miguel said, they are the experts on the ground. So what, what we are? We are experts on our shelter, and we can also come in and say, after the initial conversations with them, this is a fit, or this is not a fit, because this that recently can be because of the climate, or it can be because there are more local, locally adaptable shelters available. We never push for our shelters to be used somewhere where they don’t need to be, local solutions are almost always preferred, if that’s possible. So in many, in many instances, local solutions can be implemented. So it’s, you know, it can be wood from a local vendor, and then corrugated iron sheets or some kind of weave or the mod, I mean different kinds of local solutions as many as there are countries, basically. So those discussions are had in the beginning. Historically, we’ve worked a bit more in conflicts and protracted situations than in disasters, for example, in many cases, after disasters, there is local material available in protracted situations. In Syria, for example, it’s very difficult to source locally. The local supply chain may be broken, or because of high demand, the prices are very high and so on. So those discussions are had in the beginning. And then, of course, if there is a match and we can deliver you, have the training with their staff. Sometimes, if it’s a big implementation, we also go to the sites during COVID. We learned to do this online as well. And we learned, I mean, just as everybody else in the world, that a lot of stuff could actually be done online. So we’ve saved a lot of air travel on that since then, of course, we sometimes have to go to the sites to do training or follow ups and so on. And then usually we do follow ups after a few months or years, depending on how long the shelters are there and how big the projects are, just to see if there is maintenance that needs to be done. The shelter is also designed in a way that you can exchange panels, for example, or just remove the panels when they are not good anymore and exchange them for local material. So the whole thinking with our shelters is that it’s something that can be implemented right after the aftermath of a disaster or a conflict in an emergency, and then afterhand, it can be turned into something not permanent, but more comfortable, and that’s with the help of this metal frame. So we’ve seen this in many places, and we hope to be able to do this more and more in India. We implemented shelters with the metal frame, again, with tarpaulin, which would then be exchanged for local material after a while. Yeah, so that’s, that’s basically how it’s done. I mean, we have everything to thank our local partners and again, and we mentioned the big UN organizations and the Red Cross, but we work a lot with smaller NGOs as well, and they do a tremendous amount of work. And sometimes those smaller NGOs are also implementing partners of the big organizations.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Märta because you alluded to the use of different materials and the fact that they can be exchanged or replaced by each of the same material or the different one. My last question would be about the afterlife of the shelters. The production side is easier to understand because you get raw materials, you fabricate and you send what happens when people move out, or if the government provides for a more permanent housing for the refugees, all you have left is the shelters. What does that scenario look like? What? What happens when, once the region is not in crisis anymore, or, you know, they’ve been re-housed?

Miguel Eulate
So well, this is something that we find, actually, and this is quite important, because, for instance, no, I have it in mind now, a temporary hospital, that it was not, it was a temporary transition shelter. So it was like, I think, 200 units, no relief housing units, and it was run for three years. But then at some point, in Colombia, in Colombia, and then the migration, influx of flows for people change, so it is not needed anymore. So what the operation did, it was only used for three years, but they were really taken care of by the operation. And then you have, they took most of them, and they disassemble them, and they reduce them somewhere else for giving into a school program in the in the in the town and the municipality nearby, because they were lacking infrastructure, and some panels that we were not in goods if they were trying to look for alternative solution. So this is something that we are looking for, even each time more. And we have found the commission strategy and guidelines to support the panel, the partner, sorry, how to handle the items that they have, not the components of the center. So I think that first, what we encouraged, like, of course, reuse seed, and then to do this incremental approach, by the way, you cannot do it anymore. We change, actually, our shelters, the panels, the composition of the plastic, to make it easier to recycle. Again, in some places you don’t have any kind of recycling facility nearby, so this is something that we provide this, the island to see how they can handle it, but this is like I would say not only for us in metasta but, again, for the whole humanitarian sector.

Miguel Eulate
It is a challenge that we are facing for the future. Now, what do you do with everything that is in the ground when it is not needed anymore? Sadly, in many contexts, we found that these centers are used forever because you don’t have an alternative.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It just goes back to our initial point about the temporality, kind of converting into the permanence of.

Miguel Eulate
So, yeah, but this is something that we are working on, and we are having, like, some pilots with some partners in order to look for potential solutions. But they say, like waste management and all this, how to do the combination of these centers in many contexts. It is not a clear picture so far…

Märta Terne
But we’re looking, I mean, we have an R and D team that are working on the next generation of shelters. And this is, of course, the main scope can be more sustainably friendly, and how can they further be, I mean, easier to turn into something else when not needed as shelters anymore. It’s already happening a lot. I mean, we have the steel pipes, which we’ve seen used as other things, I mean everything from fences to being pre sold in the local market and so on. And we have, for two years, a very good life cycle analysis mechanism in place where we’re measuring everything from cradle to gates.

Miguel Eulate
It means from the source of the materials to the production line. So this is something that we have the chance to map. And we are working with really nice factories, providers that are providing all this info, so we can really tell the carbon footprint of our is in the production level, but then when we are deployed to the field, this is something that is still a question mark, and working on that.

Märta Terne
Yeah,absolutely. And I think looking ahead to long term product development, of course, we’re looking at other types of material, bio based, cardboard, whatever can be used that is even easier to recycle or turned into something else or to handle Exactly. So I think, I mean, a lot of work is put into to that now, and it’s very exciting, and it’s when you’re forced to to look into these issues, you can always find solutions and find ways forward, but I think it’s a challenge that we and the humanitarian sector are looking at, because again, the focus is to alleviate suffering and Saving lives, right? So the focus has never been long term. It’s been like now we go in and we deal with the situation, and then we deal with what’s left of it afterwards, you know? And now everyone’s forced to look into the afterwards as well. But the whole thinking with our shelters is, again, it’s something that can be used in the beginning of a crisis and then turn into something else. And that’s also what the humanitarian sector is now trying in different ways to work better with the new reality we’re in where a lot of crises are protracted and a lot of crises are a combination of a conflict and a disaster. So it’s called the humanitarian development nexus, where humanitarian organizations work together with development actors and states to work together. So it’s not a division. You know, humanitarian organizations and humanitarian response is one thing, and then development is one thing. But actually thinking, thinking and working together, there’s so much work put into this at the moment. So I think we don’t know, really yet when, when the new version of our shelter is going to be released, but within a few years, we can say yes, and at the same time working with our partners to support them, with the afterlife and recycling.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think it’s just commendable to be able to work or use design with such an intention and such a noble cause, I would say. But also beyond that, I think it’s even more commendable to be able to navigate all these large organizations and all you know, bureaucratic structures, because it’s not just your UNHCR, but you’re also working with local governments. You’re working with national governments, and I’m sure there’s a lot of resistance also that you might be facing when it comes to working at a hyper local level. So kudos for all your work, and we wish you all the best. And thank you for being on the podcast.

Miguel Eulate
Thank you so much.

Märta Terne
Thanks for having us.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.