Ikea Foundation Introduces Better Refugee Shelter 163
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.
Ok.... (Score:1, Insightful)
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...
Re:Ok.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a whole household full of IKEA products that have served me well for years, I see no reason why the same couldn't apply to these shelters too.
Re:Ok.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a whole household full of IKEA products that have served me well for years, I see no reason why the same couldn't apply to these shelters too.
The difference, of course, is your Ikea furniture isn't exposed to the elements. A 3 year lifespan for a temporary shelter isn't bad...
Re:Ok.... (Score:5, Informative)
The British have been making them since the 18th century for export all over their empire. Quite a few are still in use.
http://miniatures.about.com/od/scaleminiatures/ig/Corrugated-Iron-House/Moody-Gosset-House-Front-View.htm [about.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_tabernacle [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefabricated_building [wikipedia.org]
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I think you're mixing up barracks style prefab construction with refugee shelters.. the least you could have done would have been to link to some british army tents or something because these are more like that.
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Go set your IKEA products out in the elements for a while and see if they even last 6 months.
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You could fit a bunch of PODS in a shipping container. a PODS could work for a living structure.
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Yeah, if you want people to die of heatstroke. The PODS design becomes a solar oven in no time.
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Some shipping containers collapse for the return trip.
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The vast majority however are not.
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Its designed for situaions where less cargo is carried on the return trip, so they save space by collapsing the containers.
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The best use for shipping containers in refugee situations would be to unload containers holding supplies then use the container with something like the Sea Box kits when it's empty. Of course the rest of the container could be filled with Ikea kits.
http://www.seabox.com/shelterpak.php [seabox.com]
Containers can be used to make structures used by the group or NGOs providing relief while families live in the tent-ish shelters.
Containers are stable at high wind velocities, easy to modify with basic equipment, and since t
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You mean like this? [shelterkraft.com]
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starting price... $17,000-$33,000
Yeah... no. If you've got 30k. you're not hurting for living space.
We managed to buy a three-story, stationary, brick-built building from our town for an equivalent of $7,000. (Reason: lack of interested buyers due to its location, but still...) That's something like 200 m^2 of living space. These designs are certainly interesting, but if I'm not mistaken, you could buy an RV of the same size for a similar price, AND you'd be mobile.
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yeah but thinking inside the container is hipsta coolio.
also, I'd think that a truck + container would be more badass than a rv.
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*looks at his Ikea deck chairs*
Yeah, still there.
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Most IKEA products aren't -designed- to be exposed to the elements, though. They are designed to be placed indoors in a controlled environment.
I'm pretty sure these shelters are designed with weather in mind at least until something else is proven.
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Most IKEA products aren't -designed- to be exposed to the elements, though. They are designed to be placed indoors in a controlled environment.
I'm pretty sure these shelters are designed with weather in mind at least until something else is proven.
You are pretty wrong. Shelters are made to be extremely cheap and easy to transport. At the moment transporting cost is the limiting factor. The cost of setting up a refugee shelter is measured in its weight.
Mostly refugee shelters are just tents but sometimes they are made of recycled cardboard boxes or tents supported by a paper tube frame.
Here is a link to an article about a refugee shelter where heavy rain damaged 7000 tents. [unhcr.org]
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Whoosh.
The GP was talking about the subject of this whole thread - an Ikea designed shelter which was designed specifically to hold up to the environment better than the tents currently being used.
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Those that are designed to be outside would probably last quite well.
Of course if you're a dumbass like most people and buy indoor stuff for outdoors, you deserve what you get. Though people who have their Ikea failures usually are the same types that get electric shocks from their indoor fans that they move outdoors "because what could happen, right?"
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Which IKEA products? The ones made of fibre board? The ones made of glass? The ones made of plastic? The ones made of metal?
Is there some weird reason why you think IKEA are only capable of making products out of completely unsealed untreated wood?
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That's news to me. My outdoor set was fine after 7 years. It just needed some mould removed. I've never had anything IKEA break which didn't die from old age, and half my house is from there given that it's one of the cheapest ways to build a kitchen / bedroom / living room / entertaining area.
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I imagine the ones that are designed for outdoor use [ikea.com] would manage quite nicely, thank you.
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High triple digits? Really? Even 200*F is still the low triple digits. High triple digits suggests a leading 7 or 8 at least, meaning water has long since ceased being liquid, most plastics are no longer solid (and may have spontaneously combusted), and even many common metals are no longer particularly rigid. Oh, and you are long since dead and reduced to carbon ash and firestorms have consumed pretty much all organic matter in the area.
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Rankine obviously. Still a stretch to 'high'.
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Why would you expect products designed for inside use to last outside? Put your TV out in the rain for a while and see how well it does.
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Imagine that, a TV designed for outdoor use does OK outdoors. Now try that with a typical TV intended only for indoor use.
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a) It is a prototype. Perfect fit is not expected.
b) People tend to stay in refugee camps not because of the comfort of the facilities, but due to the fact that WAR still is raging.
Re:Ok.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, right!
I heard that back where those refugees came from there are loads of free bullets. Why can't they eat them?! You don't even have bend down to pick them up, they're flying right around in the air at head height!!
But I guess that's not good enough for them. That's why they're coming over here into the middle of desert, stealing our barren landscape.
So selfish.
Excuse me while I go buy a new iPad.
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I have mod points, but I can't find the option for +1 Weapons Grade Sarcasm.
Well done.
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Also, why the hell would you want to make things more comfortable in a shelter? You do NOT want to give people a reason to stay longer.
Exactly right! If you're taking care of refugees, you want to make sure they're as miserable as possible so the better choice is for them to go back 'home' so their daughters can be be raped and their sons can be forced to become child soldiers.
Fuckwit. Do you even know what a refugee is?
Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Good on Ikea. Though I wish they had said what crazy swedish name they were going to call these things.
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Wait, that's taken
Re: Makes sense (Score:1)
you didn't know the IKEA 19-inch rack solution? that's LACK :)
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Funny)
Though I wish they had said what crazy swedish name they were going to call these things.
I figured they'd call it SHAANTEA.
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You misunderstood: the durability of the *current* tents (canvas) is 6 months, although the average family lives in the camp for 12 years (presumably in the same tent).
The durability of the IKEA shelter (not the tent) is 3 years.
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The most logical name:
FLYKTINGBOSTÃDER
We need those here (Score:5, Interesting)
San Francisco has 8,000 homeless people. Those could help.
Re:We need those here (Score:5, Insightful)
San Francisco has 8,000 homeless people. Those could help.
The problem is, where do you put them up? NIMBY ('Not In My Back Yard!!') is the watchword here.
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Or, you could 3D-print a permanent house. I believe there are companies that are trying to pursue this path.
yeah.. but it's not like in california the problem is that there weren't buildings. the homeless problem is separate from that..
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actually this kind of thing can be put up by a group of N-M people (where N is the capacity of said hut) within a few hours.
WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE THE FOLKS LIVE IN WHILE THE REAL HOUSE IS BEING BUILT??
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If time were the only issue then how about something like Monolithic Domes. They can drive in their equipment to a prepared construction site and have one of the most durable, well-insulated buildings on the planet ready for you to move in within a day or two.
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Or maybe don't enable them to be any bit more comfortable as homeless people?
Yes, there are some people that life has purely shat upon. If you can cull them out and help them, great, but the fact is that MOST homeless people are there because they made shitty life choices.
While the impulse to help them is genuinely kind, if you make 'being homeless' any less onerous, what are you going to get? MORE HOMELESS.
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San Francisco has 8,000 homeless people. Those could help.
The problem is, where do you put them up? NIMBY ('Not In My Back Yard!!') is the watchword here.
Start with Nevada. Send back the 5000 bused and dumped there by that State's various NGOs and government agencies.
Sig heil much? Take that Godwin.
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The homeless aren't refugees and can't be treated like them. 8000 crazy alcoholics with poor impulse control would indeed be a NIMBY nightmare.
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Wait are you talking about Wall Street traders?
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8000 winos trying to follow Ikea assembly instructions. A sight to behold. They'll end up sleeping in the cardboard packing.
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Judging from what those assembly instructions look like, my guess is that you have to be drunk, high or otherwise ... let's say "have augmented senses" to understand them.
Thus the need for a global basic income (Score:2)
Or improved gift economy, better democratic planning, or better subsistence.
Why not the Hexayurt? (Score:2)
Re:Why not the Hexayurt? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard to pack in boxes, and they make inefficient use of limited land, that's my guess.
Might also be harder to assemble.
Since Ikea Already uses one percent of all the processed wood [gizmodo.in] in the world, i suspect they also know that other designs are more resource demanding.
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Re:Why not the Hexayurt? (Score:4, Informative)
Hexayurts/hexadomes are put together out of plywood, not canvas and sticks. If painted, they should last substantially more than ten years. And they are made out of materials available pretty much anywhere in the USA, we have a lot of plywood. It doesn't even matter too much what kind of plywood you use.
I just have to wonder how this project compares to erecting hexayurts costwise. We are talking about Ikea, masters of charging a lot for crap.
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The Ikea thing looked much more durable than the hexayurt I helped set up, but it wasn't designed to be permanent.
The Ikea thing is specifically designed for semi-permanent use...
good ideas ...... (Score:3)
This should settle the old question (Score:2)
Are Ikea products at least on average shipped with the correct number of screws, bolts and parts?
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I've purchased fourteen pieces of Ikea furniture. I have yet to get one that didn't have all the pieces necessary, and if you should be unlucky enough to be missing parts, replacements can be obtained from Ikea easily.
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Are you sure they were spares? ;-)
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Roughly all of my furniture with the exception of the chair I'm sitting in now came from Ikea.
Let me be the chairman then, as I just picked a chair (TORKEL [ikea.com]) from Ikea. Luckily enough I was able to purchase a demo unit for €30.
Nice product, comfortable and ergonomic.
Perhaps the bigger problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Well, since refugee's are usually fleeing their home country the problem probably exists outside your ability to gracefully intervene. Your solutions are pretty much limited to maintaining indefinite refugee camps, shipping the refugees elsewhere (if anyone will take them), or granting them citizenship or at least work visas so they can become contributing members of their new country of residence (with all the problems that causes to the local labor markets). Or of course getting deeply mired in the inte
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Well, since refugee's are usually fleeing their home country the problem probably exists outside your ability to gracefully intervene. Your solutions are pretty much limited to maintaining indefinite refugee camps, shipping the refugees elsewhere (if anyone will take them), or granting them citizenship or at least work visas so they can become contributing members of their new country of residence (with all the problems that causes to the local labor markets). Or of course getting deeply mired in the internal politics of your neighbors who have already been shooting at each other for years. Not really a lot of good options there.
Oh, I'm definitely not saying that there are any good options, just questioning the wisdom of attempting to design 'temporary housing' if your actual use case ends up being north of a decade long. 'Temporary' usually comes with substantial tradeoffs(either in price, if it's the good stuff, or in quality, if it's the cheap seats). Those are generally worth it if 'permanent' or 'semi-permanent' are overqualified and overpriced/hard to remove for the job because you are only expecting people to be staying for
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>I'd imagine that there is a strong incentive for everyone involved to pretend that any given situation is purely temporary, it'll be over shortly; but I suspect that maintaining that illusion might be leading to sub-optimal allocation of resources and design efforts that are aiming at the wrong goals.
And there I think you've hit the nail on the head. Allocation of time, energy, and resources is no doubt sub-optimal, but the alternative is to spend political capital. And it takes a pretty altruistic pol
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Asking how long is irrelevant....
It doesn't even matter which question is asked:
Shoot the politicians is always the right answer.
well.. considering that shooting the politicians on repeat has been the cause for many of these camps..
UNHCR Representative... (Score:1)
"They last for around three years" (Score:1)
Better than most of their furniture.
Sounds terrible... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds terrible... (Score:4, Interesting)
*Cough* Ever heard of statelessness? (Score:2)
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 rushi
It's about cost (Score:5, Informative)
Quality of Life? (Score:2)
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?
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I am sure I know less about it than you. The current tents are not designed for long or even medium term living. Unfortunately long term housing is what they end up being used for. Yes it costs more up front but so do adding sewers and water supplies. They are all a requirement for living healthily and reasonably.
The problem with permanent or semi-permanent structures is that in many cases the "host" country does not want them. In disaster situations this idea is known to work. There are still people livin
Wind? (Score:2)
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?
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I can't think of where there are currently any refugees (at least, in large numbers) in cold places, no. Odd, really. Does anyone else know of any?
Conveniently missing... (Score:2)
Distasters are BIG MONEY (Score:2)
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 thei
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Re: Will not stop bastards (Score:1)
Re:Will not stop bastards (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:So, are they giving it to the UN, or selling? (Score:5, Informative)
According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA [wikipedia.org] Ike does indeed have a none profit foundation, like Microsoft, Google and Ford.
But ikea itself is very much a For Profit Dutch Corporation.
Re: Only two problems. (Score:2)
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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.
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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 filli
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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.
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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
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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 fr
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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 b