RESILIENT

REFUGEE

Cities

The challenges of housing refugee populations with dignity, is being faced by host countries around the world. The design challenge is namely: how to create a new sense of home, which offers security to the refugees, but also stimulates a sense of acceptance from the host community.

Role

Architectural planning
Visual renderings
Research primary and secondary
Concept and branding
Web-platform

Tools

Adobe illustrator
Rhino
In Design
Adobe Xd

Year

2016

(revisted)

2019

Challenge

There is a refugee influx in your city, and as planning official, architect you have to move with caution and plan for a temporary future, which will have more impact than you think.

What strategies can all the stake holders employ to allow a resilient outcome for the city and everyone involved.

Constraints

Legally refugee shelters are classified as temporary, meaning planners are restricted with how they can design them.
Neighbors sue the city immediately, and do not want the temporary housing to infringe on their property value
There are legal stipulations on how large refugee shelters can be i.e. how much space allocated to each refugee
Time is of the essence-urgent housing situation- in a city with not enough apartments

Catalyst for change

The investigation is framed around the concept of moving towards a resilient future for cities, which inevitably will mean, understandings migrants as more than just a temporary “burden” on the city, but in fact a catalyst for change, growth and with appropriate planning, can positively affect the city, spatially and socially. Refugee urbanism as a terminology doesn’t necessarily exist, while the collective thought is that refugees occupy camps, shelters, and then eventually become regular members of society.

The ultimate goal of this project is to provide a suitable framework, evaluation strategy, and decision making strategy which can be used by the various stakeholders in the process, to help create a more resilient urban approach to refugee housing initiatives.

With the incoming refugee population, host countries have two main goals: to humanely house the refugees, and to enable integration, and acceptance for the refugees into society. This process requires a cooperation between the city, community and planners in order to plan for a resilient future.

What is the plan?

Refugees flow into city
They have to find housing and integrate simultaneously
Architects and planners need to work with the community to ensure this happens
They can access a toolkit to help them do this -Resilient Refugee Cities
- Online platform with typology examples for architects as a reference
- Urban strategies for city planners
- Decision making tools to help the community be in involved

Interviewing stakeholders

The next step was to interview the stake holders. We spoke to architects, city officials, refugees and to neighbors.

"We get sued by the neighbors once we announce a refugee housing will be built near by, but we just carry on working anyway. By the time the lawsuit is over, we will have our shelter"

In order to address the various sides of the issue, all stakeholders involved need to work together and create and evaluate more effective typologies, use urban strategies and finally make decisions in a way which plans for the future, and the most effective accomplishment of the aforementioned goals. What followed was an analysis of the journey of the refugees, the planners, the types of typologies, and the decision making tree that had to take place.

A board game for neighbors

How can we foster real communication between the stake holders.

Stakeholders = Players

Involve players, and allow them to be part of the process.
Learn from their experiences, and try and recruit members of the community to contribute socially.
Learn what the intentions are of various stakeholders.
Make the planning process is understandable for more members of the community.

How do we approach the platform

How can the city benefit from the new changes associated with new incoming populations? Can the impending situation force cities to deal with other greater problems, such as lack of affordable housing, lack of housing for the future ageing populations and other urban issues. urban-reset.com offers a platform where the topics of urban resilience can be shared, and the decision making strategies can be followed by various planners and members of the community.

The platform represents a point for this conversation to happen, for documentation of successful projects to be compiled. It also will have tools for better participation strategies, such as the board game. The design and format would have to focus on stories and the organisation of the content:

Typology examples
Stories of urban resilience.
Decision making tools.

The toolbox of ideas, examples, and tools (such as the board game) became the focus. The UI design was laid out in a simple way with the strong colors of red, grey and black in combination with images, creates an eye catching landing page. However, despite the urgency of the red (a non profit color) the feel of the website still feels warm and modern.

Challenges:

Creating an interactive platform.
Fostering a community to keep the toolbox growing.
The organic growth of platform.
Accessibility of platform to different demographics.

The research focused on solutions and the platform, or website represents one of the solutions, but the development of it would require another design process. The project was a beginning point in a disciplinary approach to a problem by integrating: policy oriented solutions, spatial strategies and digital products in collaboration.

Complicated problems require a variety of stakeholders, experts as well as a cross disciplinary design strategies and this investigation represents a starting point.