Humanitarian Housing

The Challenge.

Every day 40,000 people are forced to abandon their homes due to war, discrimination and other human or environmental causes. Increasingly stressed environmental and human systems are spawning nomadic communities, the housing for whom is fundamentally challenging the established architectural principle of permanence, form and function.

There is an urgently need to propose quickly deployable and demountable, open-source, scalable, low cost collective housing systems designed for reuse, built without machinery, using widely available, usually in-stock, generic industrial materials. The housing systems, when relocated, should leave the land as it was found.

These open source reference designs should cover each of the world’s major climatic zones and the instructions be laymen ready in clarity and understanding.

There is an increasing role to be played by Non-Governmental agencies, Philanthropic organisations and Individuals in helping apply the CRRF framework. We are collaborating with Architecture Schools on a design effort for modular rapid collective housing for large numbers of displaced people using normally in-stock materials available in any construction industry.

By 2050—in just three regions—climate change could force more than 143 million people to move within their countries...