“Refugees didn’t just escape a place. They had to escape a thousand memories until they’d put enough time and distance between them and their misery to wake to a better day.” — Nadia Hashimi
We are often ungrateful for the blessings we have, be it family, food, or shelter. When we talk about the basic needs of a person’s life, we take 3 commodities into account i.e. food, clothe, and shelter.
Don’t we all should feel blessed to have permanent shelters, be it small or big, basic, or luxurious? Does the thought of ‘NO SHELTER’ ever cross your mind, even for a second? Does it not give you chill shivers? Yes, even a thought of the same is a nightmare for us.
But some of us have bad fate and this nightmare turns into a reality, a scenario one never thinks of. We all have heard the word “REFUGEE’ and somewhere back in the mind we have a glimpse of what it means. Let’s elaborate that. “Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country.” as defined by UNHCR.
Who is not familiar with what happened in Syria and what Syrians have gone through? A major chunk of Syrian population has just shifted to their neighbouring countries. These refugees have 6.6 million civilians in Syria.
One protest, one war, one disaster, and one night, this ‘ONE’ changes a person’s life in a topsy turvy manner. It’s a well-known fact that whatever happens in a country, common people are the ones who suffer the most. Someone started a war and they are the ones who are at risk. People tend to leave their country when their limits of tolerance are pushed. Their life switches in a snap of a finger. From being called ‘CIVILIANS’ they turned to be called out as ‘REFUGEES’. Once they leave their country there is no coming back. They flee because of lost living conditions in their countries, and thanks to other countries who allow them to stay. From stone-age humans have always travelled places in search of better living conditions and these counties least provide them with bare human needs. They leave their countries with just a few clothes and some basic necessary things.
Refugees tend to stay on the outskirts of a country in temporary camps known as ‘Refugee Camps’. These camps are usually set up and back up by various organizations like UN, UNHCR, UNICEF, and many more. These organizations help them by providing temporary shelters, food, water supply, electricity, and basic medical needs.
Temporary shelters, for sure, with a shade overhead but there is more lot what permanent structures provide. These shelters do not provide you with security and the effect of not having a permanent place to settle impacts on their mental health.
Human is a social being and apart from shelters, they need more social places like religious places, recreational places, and for sure educational places. These organizations have put some effort to least provide the younger generation places to study that help them to cover what they have lost in terms of academics as well as their life.
Hope is something that stands with them. It is something that kept them moving and they made a huge leap in their lives. What came to them as a ray of hope is some architects that looked upon their living conditions and tried the best to add some joy in their lives by creating some spaces in refugee camps. Architects visited them, conversed with them. They took the missing spaces as problems and the lifestyle of these people, their culture, and their experiences, along with their own experiences and knowledge, as a solution.
Further in this article let’s take a look at some of the spaces, not particularly shelter but spaces that enhanced these refugees camp with some social and communal aspect.
Maidan Tent – Architectural Aid for Europe’s Refugee Crisis
Europe emerged with some unresolved Syrian Refugee Crisis, architects and designers came forward to improve their living conditions by their design skills. It is a proposed hub proposed to be designed at a refugee camp in Ritsona, Greece by Bonaventura Visconti di Modrone and Leo Bettini Oberkalmsteiner along with UN International Organization for Migration.
In refugee camps, the haphazard ordering of tents and containers, as well as the lack of common ground, can result in isolation and segregation. The design team, therefore, believed that the usually organized space provided by the Maidan Tent can allow the public to play, participate, and express themselves under an immovable, shaded, and expressive structure. The word ‘Maidan’ itself is derived from the Arabic ‘square’, also signifying the program’s commitment to social interaction.
The Maidan Tent covers an area of 200 square meters of the aluminium structure covered with water, air, and fireproof fabric, providing a safe, secure space for up to 100 people. The shelter is flexible in nature, has the same features that allow for easy installation and adjustment, as well as eight flexible spaces that can be adjusted for wide use. The design of the scheme is a direct attempt to invite people to enter any direction, where a series of secret spaces can allow refugees to build personal relationships.
2. The Garden Library
One can never think what a person goes through as a refugee until they sail in the same boat and they need an escape from their reality even if it meant for some amount of time. Yoav Meiri Architects took this thought and made a social-artistic urban community project by designing a public library. It is situated in Levinski Park, by the Tel Aviv central bus station and founded in 2010.
It is no ordinary library. No wall, no doors, just two bookshelves containing a number of books with infinite knowledge. It is equipped with transparent light and illumination to study at night time, with upper shelves for adults and lower for kids. The doors to the small cabinet swing down to form a parquet floor for the children to sit on and review the books. A long cabinet door opens to provide an open space above the two buildings, also provides shelter from the sun and rain, protects books and visitors, and creates a space for browsing, reading, and communication meetings.
It was important for architects to build a space that those who maintain illegal immigrant status will come without fear, that the library would not have a closed-door or a guard at the entrance who would check and ask questions and by far they have successfully achieved it.
3. Moving Schools
The idea of moving school came up when David & Louise Cole visited Mae Sot, a small industrial town on the Thai-Burmese border that hosted Burmese refugees. They came up with the idea of a school building that could be taken down and relocated to the public, perhaps one day being able to relocate to Burma.
In 2011, Building Trust International launched an international design competition inviting Architects, Designers, and Engineers to come up with a new design solution for a middle-class school with a refugee and refugee community on the Thai / Burma border. The winning project created by American architects Dan La Rossa and Amadeo Benedetta was built in partnership with Iron Wood, a social enterprise at Mae Sot run by young immigrants who have been trained as students and passed on their skills to others. In doing so the school became a learning tool in its own right to provide skills in sharing the metalworking skills of the metal frame construction and carpentry skills needed to build bamboo wall panels. This design expands the use of traditional methods of building bamboo on walls and surfaces. The school has the ability to be constructed and demolished from time to time due to the structure of the steel frame with simple repeated details. The foundations are designed to be non-concrete by filling the recycled tires with composite gravel for the basic elements to work.
The Building Trust team has worked with local workers, international volunteers, local communities, school children, parents, school teachers, and principals to complete the construction of the school for more than three months and can host up to 500 students.
"Everyone has the right to basic needs and no one should be restricted from them. These and many other architects and designers played a major role in changing their lives not just physically but also psychologically. Not only refugees are benefited from this but the field of architecture gets design solutions by resolving their problems. When one can't access the buildings, an effort is made to design spaces that become part of their lifestyle."