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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.
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?
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!
According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA Ike does indeed have a none profit foundation, like Microsoft, Google and Ford.
But ikea itself is very much a For Profit Dutch Corporation.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
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.
Most of my furniture is from IKEA (I'm in Sweden, so that's kind of natural). I've moved twice with the same furniture, and didn't have any problems. Or, well, last time I had to look up the documentation for the bed online since I didn't remember who things should be put together... but apart from that - no problems.
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
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.
So what you are saying is that Ikea furniture sucks because unlike other furniture it can not be disassembled before moving?
Then don't disassemble it.
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
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?
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.
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.
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!
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You know nobody will leave the solar panels and LED lights behind.
If this is widely deployed, in 100 years the worst parts of Africa will have these solar panels ganged up on peoples traditional housing. That's of course assuming Africa is still a basket case.
Smart design would make these parts modular and remove able. The UN/host country is only going to doze the camp after the people leave.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Your wrong; you are not enlightened; you are deluded.
Mutual prosperity is hear by any reasonable historic definition. The first worlds 'poor' are fat. It is coming/has already come to much of China and India. Globally the middle class is going strong.
There will be ugly bits, just as there were ugly bits in the first world, hopefully they will get to real market capitalism soon and let their currencies float. I also hope we clean up our markets, perhaps some real honest foreign competition will force us to clean up our capital markets.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's a Swedish corporation, but headquartered in the Netherlands because of the tax break they get there.
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.
Capitalism is a nice idea, extremely effective at efficiently allocating resources. But left to itself it's a self-destroying process - barring spectacular stupidity capitalism concentrates wealth into the hands of those who have it to begin with. It doesn't take long before those who have benefited from the wealth concentration manage to leverage their economic power into regulatory capture and other political power, destroying the free market. And many, many markets are natural monopolies where even a free market won't help things.
I'm not sure what exactly the solution is, but I think a measure of socialism is likely going to be part of it. You wouldn't expect the water cycle to remain stable if the water flowed into the oceans and then remained there to be leveraged in the internal power struggles of the whales, instead evaporation pumps that water back out into the hinterlands where it can then flow back to the sea, transforming the land along the way. I think we need something similar in our economic cycles - the myth of trickle-down economics has been pretty seriously debunked at this point, and is about the only mechanism unfettered capitalism offers for completing the cycle. Perhaps something like a "10% income redistribution tax" would do the trick - everyone is taxed based on income, the proceeds to be distributed equally to everyone - with the present income distribution in the US I believe something like 80%-90% of the population would benefit from that directly, and a steady flow of serious wealth from the bottom would give new economic players a chance to compete with and even overthrow the old conglomerate giants, reducing the market-destroying influence of the major powers.
Especially as ever cheaper and more powerful automation removes the need for human labor we're going to have to come up with new economic models. At present we seem to be headed for a world where those few who happen to be holding overwhelming economic power when near-total automation takes over will own all production and, aside from their chosen servants and jesters, the rest of us will starve. We already have the technology and productivity to turn the world into the sort of low-labor utopias dreamed of a century ago, personally I think we should at least make the attempt.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It was an ikea joke.
Sorry if I offended one of your favorite massive multi-nationals.
This space available.
My experience:
You can place IKEA furniture (or other brand cheap fiberwood) and use it for years without problems.
You can take it apart and reassemble it. There may be some additional play on the connections, but nothing major. If you are a klutz and bump into your furniture all the time this little bit of play will become a large bit of play and the furniture is destroyed.
If you do not bump into your furniture all the time, you can disassemble it again and reassemble it. But you'll have to use a filling glue in the joints. Polyurethane worked perfectly with the old fiber boards, dunno about the new (polyurethane doesn't work on MDF).
The next time you take it apart you'll need a hammer.
Now my old oak furniture is a bit different. You just can't take that apart. That 4 m long cabinet is going to take at least a 4 m long trailer. Granted, it'll survive that transport a lot more times than the fiber board ones.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Certainly. And yet the path of history suggests that the rest of us are claiming an ever-growing amount of wealth and power from the aristocrats. Sure, the story hasn't been going well in the US lately, but over the course of centuries there seems to be a pretty clear, if sawtoothed, trend. The question now seems to me to be which will come first? The next possibly violent leap forward for populist equality, or the development of sufficiently advanced automated war machines so that the human ranks can be reduced to only the most hard-core loyalists, removing dissent within the ranks as a limiting consideration. I imagine the latter could potentially delay the former for quite some time, but even a pax imperia will eventually collapse under the weight of internal strife and indolence.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.