Thermally Resilient Shelter Design

Rationale: Shelters, unlike other buildings, are by definition, temporary. Modern requirements for shelters often arise in remote locations or in response to large humanitarian crises. Indeed, we are currently experiencing the largest forced migration of people on record, with current estimates at nearly 69M people - a population the size of the UK. Hence, adequate refugee shelter is a pressing issue. Understandably, in a developing humanitarian crisis, thermal
conditions are usually not given high priority. However, as the lifetime of camps is extended, many otherwise temporary encampments get converted into a more permanent state, and are termed “transitional” by the aid agencies. Some studies have suggested the average lifetime of such transitional shelters is 17 years. The core issues we wish to explore with this workshop, are hence:

(i) how low-cost high-resilience shelters can be designed and
(ii) how one may consider aspects of culture, tradition, politics and other socio-economic norms whose interaction with the built environment significantly affect performance.