Better Shelters and the rest of that Ikea story

It’s a hard question to answer: How to house people driven from their homes? The numbers right now are around 65.3 million displaced worldwide, 23.1 million of whom are classified as refugees by UNHCR [1]. That’s a lot of homes. Or houses. Or tents. A lot of people with a lot of hardships who need somewhere to rest, to be safe, to feel human, and for some, to live for years and decades. UNHCR tents last for six months, which is very optimistic about, say, when Syrian refugees can go home or, say, Somalis in Dabaab, Kenya and Palestinians in Lebanon, some of whom have made it into their 20s living only in refugee camps, can go home. Into this space comes a solution that isn’t novel, but does have a certain spin of realism to it: to design and build a structure that is both meant to be temporary, but is enough like an actual house that it embraces how humans live in structures.  

When Shane Snow wrote the article “A New Ingeniously Designed Shelter for Refugees--Made By Ikea” in 2013, there were 43 million displaced people, which is beside the point since it’s hard to imagine such large numbers. What’s not beside the point is Shane Snow’s reportage. It’s great that the Ikea Foundation (not Ikea proper, as advertised in the title) and UNHCR got behind this project, but looking for an update on this story, I found, from the Ikea Foundation nonetheless [2], the protagonist that Snow missed: Better Shelter, which is the “Swedish social enterprise” that designed and builds the these shelters (called simply “Better Shelters”). The Ikea Foundation provided the funds, UNHCR access to the populations in need, but it was a social innovation design firm that created the product, as they say, “designed with and for refugees” [3]. 10,000 were erected in 2015. As the Ikea Foundation and Better Shelter consider it, the “ingenious” part isn’t the design, but the way they focused on refugee needs and humanity to provide a better place to live.

In the latter half of 2013 through the end of 2014, I participated in a number of projects in Georgia’s IDP (internally displaced persons) settlements. The civil wars in the 1990s and the August War with Russia in 2008 left about 232,700 Georgian who still have this status [4]. One major policy hurdle the Georgian government has struggled with is housing, in large because the Georgian government doesn’t acknowledge that they lost the territory where the IDPs lived, and neither do the IDPs. How can a house be a home when governments and those displaced don’t consider it their home? I imagine it’s similar for many of the other refugees and the governments and organizations that host them. While Better Shelters aren’t the best-of-all-possible-worlds answer (i.e. it doesn’t bring peace), they provide a solution and a way of thinking that acknowledges the realities of how it is to live as a refugee.

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[1] "Figures at a Glance." UNHCR News. 2015. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.

[2]  "What Home Is for a Refugee without One - IKEA Foundation." IKEA Foundation. August 17, 2016. https://www.ikeafoundation.org/stories/home-refugee-without-one/.

[3]  Better Shelter. http://www.bettershelter.org/.

[4]  "Georgia IDP Figures Analysis." IDMC. December 2014. http://www.internal-displacement.org/europe-the-caucasus-and-central-asia/georgia/figures-analysis.