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Ikea Foundation Introduces Better Refugee Shelter
Lasrick writes "This is truly brilliant: Ikea has joined with the UN Refugee Agency to design a longer lasting flatpack shelter that includes a solar panel and UV reflecting material."
From the article: "Ikea's design, a cross between a giant garden shed and a khaki canvas marquee, is formed from lightweight laminated panels that clip on to a simple frame, providing UV protection and thermal insulation. Like an Ikea product, the polymer panels come packed in a box, along with a bag of pipes, connectors and wires – and no doubt a cartoon construction manual." And they last for around three years.
You don't have to live like a refugee!
So... the steel rod goes through the tarp and latches onto... wait... ... is that a screw? This thing better not fall apart in a week...
The video said the average family will be in these tents for ten years, while the durability of these tents is 3 years (up from 6 months from the old tents). That sounded odd to me until I realized I've been living for 6 years with Ikea furniture which felt like it would last two months.
Good on Ikea. Though I wish they had said what crazy swedish name they were going to call these things.
San Francisco has 8,000 homeless people. Those could help.
Nobody knows why Ikea ignored the hexayurt designs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexayurt , http://hexayurt.com/ ). NIH?
The reason I ask is that Ikea is here in the US as a non-profit claiming that their profits go to charity.
It seems like they ought to be giving these to the UN for use in locations like Pakistan, or the areas around Syria.
But, Ikea strikes me as they will sell it to them.
AND STEALING THE RAPE!
are often simple to use when they come to fruition. One could say this approach was obvious - so obvious in fact that no-one else has made it work yet. It quite likely needs some fine tuning but what implementation of an idea does not? Good work!
But are IKEA still shitting in their meatballs?
Experience with IKEA leads me to believe they'll need a tightening every now and then.
Are Ikea products at least on average shipped with the correct number of screws, bolts and parts?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ikea furniture can be fine - until ... you move house.
It's not made to be taken to pieces and put back together again - a second time.
Hope the refugees are not on the move ... oops.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Since when was a "polymer panel" fiberboard? So doors this mean your second point is nonsense as well? Did you actually read the articles or just see an IKEA bookshelf once?
No, although a solid panel has got to be an improvement over a tent, and it also suggests it can form the interior of a beefed up structure.
While any incremental advances in design are a good thing, it seems like the timescales we are talking about here are starting to get into 'perhaps you need to re-think your approach to the problem...' territory.
12 years is really pushing the idea of 'temporary' to the limit. How long do you go before you stop trying to incrementally decrease the squalor in a given refugee camp and start to admit that either you need to get your shit together on whatever is keeping your refugee camp full, or you need to admit that you have no resolution in sight on that one, and admit that your refugee camp is now a town.
We keep waiting for someone to come along and save us but everything we need to know to make our future better is available to us. Scholars of the past have thought about and worked out most of societies problems. I can say this because most of us are well adapted and I think, aside from a little minor greed, could come to some comprimise that would result in mutual prosperity. The unfortunate part is that the ones who need to understand this message the most would be unable to understand it and the whole thing would probably result in some kind of violent uprising becoming the very thing that was initially set out to be avoided. Such is life. What do the enlightened do? It is not our move. Please tell me I am wrong? :)
this will not stop a gang of rapists cutting their way in from the side raping everyone stealing and what they like
probably better than a white sheet over a couple of wires though
If you are reduced to relying on fortified architecture for that, you arguably have bigger problems(as well as problems that should be solvable at lower cost and weight by some flavor of law enforcement, rather than fortress architecture). Tents are, naturally, pitifully insecure; but you have to go a substantial distance up the food chain before there isn't a fairly obvious flaw that a few reasonably strong guys(bonus points for users) can crack in a couple of minutes.
A good number of homeless are not winos but refugees from The American Way. The fact that many have no intention of getting back onto the treadmill of consumerism says more about the US way of life than about them.
Is working your ass off your entire life for possessions and having a good credit rating really living in freedom?
Could they have picked a worse spokesperson? His English was barely intelligible with such a heavy French accent. Why did we need him to even speak when Jonathan from the IKEA Foundation did such a fine job at explaining everything?
user@host$ diff
Better than most of their furniture.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Six months sounds good enough, to me. That's longer than I would want to live in a temporary shelter. Much longer and you're not so much providing humanitarian aid, as you are shipping-in prefabricated houses for many thousands of people.
Those six months should be ample time to put together enough clay/adobe bricks to build a real, semi-permanent structure, with ample insulation, firebox, etc. Roofing materials might be more difficult, but helping to source those is better than giving out housing you've deemed "acceptable"...
After 6 months, you should be building-up an economy... Paying some of those local refugees (a truly tiny amount of) money, to construct real homes for their fellow refugees, and hopefully even a few commercial structures.
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I have worked in disaster response operations as a logistics and procurement person for six years, including rapid onset refugee settlements. Though I haven't worked directly in camp management, I have worked with purchasing, transporting and setting up these types of tents before. It doesn't say in this article, but other sources point out that even at mass production, the IKEA shelter will cost about twice as much as a canvas tent. At the end of the day, if you're setting up a tent city for 20,000 displaced refugees, that's a difference between 10 and 20 million dollars. Any large aid organization or donor simply isn't going to be able to justify doubling its operation costs. I should also add that one of the selling points of the IKEA structure is that tents only last six months, while these will last years. I don't know how long the UNHCR tents were designed for, but I think it's safe to say that in virtually every settlement I have been to, those tents tend to last longer than six months...alot longer. Usually, the tents are up for multiple years at a time, sometimes reused. This is not a justification for their crappy construction or poor amenities, but I have seen canvas tents that have been one place for six years, so the argument that the IKEA shelters is more economical in the long run isn't grounded in reality. Link to outside info: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/06/27/196356373/new-kind-of-ikea-hack-flat-packs-head-to-refugee-camps?ft=1&f=1004
So doors this mean your second point is nonsense as well?
I think it doors, but we wall have to see.
That's a very good way of defining the issue, although perhaps not as you intended.
As long as the country is totally fixated on people making money, the homeless will always be considered a problem to be fixed instead of our disadvantaged neighbors.
In a civilized society, work is something to be cherished by those who want to make their mark on society by contributing their interest and expertise. Today it's a necessary evil required for having a roof over one's head and food on one's table. It's primitive as hell.
We don't even WANT to be civilized at this point in time.
Wonder how well they hold up to strong winds.. those panels look flimsy and the solar thing is sure to get ripped off. Also looks like these are aimed only at hot places. Are there no refuges where it is cold?
Come on... 12 years as a refugee? At what point are you simply just a UN freeloader trying to guilt the rest of the world into giving you free food, medicine, housing, clothing etc etc etc.
And stop making babies you stupid fucks. If you don't have a home, food or an income why are you crapping out babies and expecting the rest of the world to take care of you? If you live in a refugee camp birth control should be mandatory (hell put it in the food if that's what it takes). If you have a kid in a camp they kick you out for being an idiot for bringing a baby into the world that you can't care for.
And why on earth are we educating these stupid fucks? So they can spend another 12 years in a camp? What jobs are there for an 'educated' refugee?
Yeah.. so with all the OTHER issues a plastic outhouse/home is not really solving anything.
Is the cost comparison. Refugees almost always outnumber housing capabilities. The fact that this is an article about their merits and this info is missing raises some concern.
I hate myself for faulting anyone who is working to help refugees, but I have so many questions and doubts over this project.
1. $3 million dollars invested in the design of this flimsy shed? Why so much for so little?
2. I heard no mention of wind resistance. It would appear to be an issue, especially for the roof panels.
3. Though it is flat pack, it is a very large pack and quite heavy. When the need to deploy thousands or tens of thousands of shelters arises, will this be an issue compared to tents?
4. Cost and ready availability compared to tents? Will Ethiopia or Haiti have Ikea stores with these in stock? More seriously, will the UN maintain a stockpile of tens of thousands of these, versus tents?
5. The solar panel and LED light is a nice touch, but was it really a big design breakthrough? See #1.
6. UV reflecting material reminds me of... well... a tent.
Or improved gift economy, better democratic planning, or better subsistence.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
For those of you who do not know--IKEA is the biggest charity scam in the world. Its money is all tied up in mysterious offshore accounts. They have hundreds of millions of dollars and give away maybe a million or two per year. It is all a big tax avoidance scheme by the reclusive founder (and X-Nazi recruiter) of Ikea. So anything they claim to do is suspect. http://www.economist.com/node/6919139 http://mentalfloss.com/article/18575/ikea-worlds-largest-charity
What do the aid organizations value? Do they want a sustainable shelter that's designed for people to live in for a decade, or do they want a cheap crappy solution?
I suppose it depends on who the organizations service. Does it serve the refugees or the conscience of the donors?
The bigger the disaster the better! Bring on global warming! Lets put our charity funds (and pensions) into BP!
Governments have issues with waste and corruption but the NGOs get away with far far more and almost nothing ever happens to the crooks. No oversight or recourse.
Just look at Haiti and how much money that poor persecuted nation received but never got their hands on; the claims of corruption justifying the privatization of nearly everything and how little money got to the people. NGOs paying their employees 10x to do local jobs while the locals sat jobless - including the skilled ones. As usual, the 1 size fits all approach was used so things that are expensive and even useless are employed. Bottled water? seriously? They paid more than the price of GAS for water? Whenever it was possible, yes. Happens with everything.
Naturally, a strong military presence is required... to protect the contractors from the increasingly frustrated public... not just the small minority of criminals who provide the justification. Even if they don't exist: look at how the occupy protestors around the world were attacked on the grounds of security and sanitation!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's a Swedish corporation, but headquartered in the Netherlands because of the tax break they get there.
unfortunately, watching them put one up in that video, it's just as unnecessarily complicated and fidly to assemble as their furniture, and I don't see it being used for long because of that.
Six months sounds good enough, to me. That's longer than I would want to live in a temporary shelter. Much longer and you're not so much providing humanitarian aid, as you are shipping-in prefabricated houses for many thousands of people. (...)
After 6 months, you should be building-up an economy... Paying some of those local refugees (a truly tiny amount of) money, to construct real homes for their fellow refugees, and hopefully even a few commercial structures.
You don't seem to realize that there are millions of stateless people out there in the world.
Consider the breakups of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia for but recent examples. Not one of us says one country; not born here says the other. Stateless. Dramatically so when they end up in refugee camps, as was the case the Balkans.
What it means in practice: no citizenship in their home country; no citizenship in the country they're refugees in; no passport; no State willing to give them a passport; no State rushing to give them asylum; no right to work, let alone to travel; essentially no rights at all, in fact; nothing; zip. Just the right to sit there and wait in a camp. Sometimes for years.
Anyway, yeah, you're right on paper. It would be a lot better if you could just give them some money to move on with life. In practice, you'll find that they're simply not welcome to settle anywhere -- not even home.
It was an ikea joke.
Sorry if I offended one of your favorite massive multi-nationals.
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