Refugees fleeing the worst humanitarian crises of our time don’t just need tents – they need safe and stable long-term housing, a sense of community, access to transitional resources and plans for permanent integration into existing cities. Smart and sensitive design solutions may play just one small role in addressing the crisis, but they can help provide the architecture and infrastructure needed to start a new life.

Mannheim Refugee Pavilion, Germany

Architecture students at the University of Kaiserslautern in Mannheim created an airy community center made of latticed wood to offer a sheltered communal area for refugees arriving to an adjacent camp. The team worked with 25 refugees and building companies to create the shelter. “Due to bureaucratic procedures, refugees arriving in Germany are condemned to sustain a long period of passiveness. They are well provided with the bare essentials but the immediate area is quite desolate and lacking of quality common spaces. The residents at the preliminary reception center has the opportunity to actively shape their environment and create a quality place for common or individual use.”

20,000 New Homes for Refugees in Kenya by Shigeru Ban

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban will design 20,000 new homes for refugees at the Kalobeyei refugee settlement in Kenya based on discusses he held with refugees in the area. “The key thing will be to construct shelter where no or little technical supervision is required, and use materials that are locally available and eco-friendly,” he says. “It’s important that the houses can be easily maintained by inhabitants.”

Ikea’s Flat-Pack Refugee Shelter Named 2016 Design of the Year

The ‘Better Shelter’ by Ikea is a flat-pack structure large enough to house a family of five that can be assembled in just a few hours. Made from recyclable plastic, it consists of just 68 components and includes a solar panel to power lights and charge smartphones and other devices. It went into production in 2015, and since then, tens of thousands of units have been delivered to countries all over the world. Though it’s more practical than glamorous, the Better Shelter won the Beazley Design of the Year Award presented by the Design Museum in London in 2016.

‘Weaving a Home’ by Abeer Seikaly

Winner of a Lexus Design Award in 2013, ‘Weaving a Home’ by Abeer Seikaly is a collapsible structural fabric shelter capable of adapting to various climates. The design is cellular, made of high-strength plastic tubing woven into a fabric membrane, and segments can be left open to create doorways or windows or closed to retain heat. At the top of the unit is a water storage tank supplied by rainwater or an onsite source to provides running water inside. “Refugees carry from their homes what they can and resettle in unknown lands, often starting with nothing but a tent to call home…” says Seikaly. “In this space, the refugees find a place to pause from their turbulent worlds, a place to weave the tapestry of their new lives.”

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Rethinking The Refugee Camp 8 Architectural Proposals For Asylum Seekers

The problem of homelessness is a complex one rooted in gross stratification of wealth, and while addressing it in full means addressing poverty itself, temporary portable housing can save lives in the meantime. Many cities are implementing transitional housing programs that make use of inexpensive, easy to move structures in interstitial urban spaces. The Martin Architecture and Design Workshop (MADWORKSHOP) teamed up with students from the University of Southern California School of Architecture (USC) to come up with some creative examples of these structures.

‘The Homeless Studio’ is an organization aiming to address LA’s homelessness crisis through design. Students built a series of full-scale, inhabitable nomadic shelters ranging from contraptions that fit onto shopping carts to more comfortable structures that wouldn’t be out of place in a tiny house village. Most of the materials were scavenged from around Los Angeles, and the designs had to be collapsible and suitable for a variety of locations.

The results are sometimes more artistic than they are practical – like a hut clad in retail mannequin displays – but in many cases, the interiors are cozy and well-lit by windows and skylights, and one design even has a roof deck.

The aim of actually addressing homelessness didn’t just consist of building a few weird-looking structures and calling it a day. The students worked with city officials, local agencies, artist and activists to come up with a holistic solution in a city where nearly 47,000 people live on the streets. They’re making repeated visits to local agencies like the Skid Row Housing Trust and the Downtown Women’s Center, speaking to people experiencing homelessness to get firsthand information about their needs.

They’ll also be taking the hands-on skills and knowledge they gained through this project and applying it to a larger solution, designing a 30-bed modular shelter for women for Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission in San Fernando Valley. Their efforts over the course will be documented and compiled into a publication set for publishing by the USC School of Architecture in 2017.

Putting architecture into the hands of the people in a country where home ownership is typically out of reach, this studio has some incredibly innovative ideas, from modular units that ‘plug in’ to the envelopes of historic buildings to unexpected uses for cheap and plentiful materials. These 10 projects by People’s Architecture Office explore the convenience of prefabrication, multipurpose objects and the brilliance of simplicity while still offering structures that are bright, fresh, airy and comfortable.

Courtyard House

In Beijing, a whole lot of historic architecture has simply been cast aside in favor of newer, cleaner, more spacious suburban housing. Once-vibrant neighborhoods lacking in simple infrastructure like sewer systems are being left behind and neglected, growing more and more dilapidated. PAO has one solution: modern modular units that simply ‘plug in’ to the existing architecture to make it more livable. In the case of ‘Courtyard House,’ the original buildings are used like an envelope for newer structures that can be quickly, cheaply and easy assembled on-site.

Plugin House

The firm carried the same concept over to ‘Plugin House,’ which slots onto a tiny, awkwardly shaped plot in a traditional ‘hutong’ alleyway. The prefabricated panels used to create these structures already have insulation, plumbing, windows, doors, wiring, interior and exterior finishes built in, and they snap and lock together with no more than a single hex wrench. People who no prior construction experience can put one of these houses together in 24 hours, and it costs less than $10,000.

Plugin Tower

Plugin Tower is another PAO project that easily fits into existing urban environments, and gets around the difficulty of stable housing in China, where land is held exclusively by the government and building private homes is only affordable to the wealthy. This structure requires no foundation, so it doesn’t need planning approval, and it can be picked up and moved to a new location. The prefabricated steel frame comes in a kit of parts, and the modular living units just plug right in. You can rearrange it however you like and expand it when necessary.

Container Pavilion

Shipping containers are cheap, easy to procure, highly stackable, customizable and a breeze to transport, so it’s no surprise that PAO has made use of them. This cantilevered pavilion consists of six yellow units overlapping six red units in a perpendicular arrangement, creating shaded areas on the ground and a series of rooftop recreation spaces. The ends of each unit are glazed for views of the city and sightless through the entire building.

Hutong Insert: Beijing Culture and Art Center

PAO uses its skills in inserting modular units into historic structures in their proposal for the Beijing Culture and Art Center, set within a traditional hutong house. A competition to design the project called for a solution that would renovate the building while retaining as much of its original character as possible; PAO’s proposal makes it easy to add lots of interior space without disturbing much of the outer structure at all.

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Architecture For The People 10 Subversive And Imaginative Designs For China

City officials spend a lot of time and energy worrying about how to keep homeless people off public furniture and out of certain common areas, when they should be considering how to better manage the issue of homelessness in general. One area of focus is homeless housing, whether simply meeting the immediate needs of people who live on the streets or providing a more long-term, forward-thinking transitional living spaces. These 14 designs for homeless housing provoke thought as to how we can meet the needs of disadvantaged people living in our own communities, and ensure that the situation is only temporary.

Hopetel: Transitional High-Rise Housing

(images via: evolo.us)

Homelessness is on the rise, and millions of people across the world do not have a safe, dry place to sleep at night, let alone to perform basic tasks of personal hygiene or prepare themselves for potential employment. The ‘Hopetel’ proposes a transient solution for the waves of newly homeless people who have lost their homes due to foreclosure, providing a stable environment while they attempt to get back on their feet. The skyscraper includes compact dwelling units as well as shared amenities like laundry, storage, showers and kitchen facilities. It’s organized in a way that promotes social interaction between its residents, allowing these people to see that they are not alone.

Mobile Homeless Shelter by Paul Elkin

(images via: paul elkin)

Portable and water-tight, this concept for homeless housing by Paul Elkin could meet the demands of a certain segment of the homeless population that prefers to remain transient. Resembling an extremely compact version of an RV, this low-impact structure contains fold-away furniture, a mattress, a toilet, and even a kitchen. Theoretically it could be built at a very low cost, eliminating the need to sleep out in the open.

WheelLY Recycled Homeless Shelter by Zo-Loft Architecture & Design

(images via: zo-loft)

Portable and temporary, this unusual-looking design by Italian firm Zo-Loft provides a safe storage space for one’s belongings during the day, and expands into a tent at night. The ‘WheelLY’ is made of a rolling aluminum frame fitted with two polyester tents made of recyclable or recycled materials. The rolling design enables it to hold up to 250 pounds of personal items, and the push-handle also functions as a brake.

Back on Track by Sarah Crowley

(images via: tesseract)

Winner of a competition by Tesseract Collective, ‘Back on Track’ is a comprehensive proposal for homeless rehabilitation that involves not just housing but also community and improving long-term prospects. Going beyond just the requirements for immediate survival, ‘Back on Track’ is designed to be located along a strip of railway in designer Sarah Crowley’s town of Melbourne, Australia. Appropriating an under-used urban space that can be integrated into the surrounding city, the design includes a series of public programs that provide jobs and activities for the ‘formerly homeless’ that would live there.

Tin Man No.11 by Kacey Wong

(images via: dezeen)

Fanciful, but definitely fun, the Tin Man No.11 design by Kacey Wong takes a less serious look at how portable, wheeled trolleys could provide a safe and relatively comfortable home base for people who live on the streets. “It will not only serve as a shelter for the homeless but also decorate the city street, in a way,” says Wong of the robot-shaped design. The trolley opens to reveal a bed, desk and chair. Wong came up with the design after doing a field study on homeless people in Hong Kong, finding that many people do have jobs, but due to the high cost of living in the city, are forced to live on the streets near their place of employment.

Cardborigami: Folding Portable Homeless Shelter

(images via: inhabitat)

This portable emergency shelter was designed based on the principles of origami. Architect Tina Hovsepian created the Cardborigami shelter from recycled cardboard; it starts out as a flat package and expands into a sort of paper tent. The material was chosen because it is inexpensive, lightweight, sustainable and naturally insulated. Hovsepian plans to refine the design to make it waterproof, fire-retardant and more comfortable.

Sleepbox by Arch Group

(images via: dezeen)

The Sleepbox was actually designed with the intention of providing a compact space to take a nap, in environments like airports, but the design could easily be adapted for homeless housing as well. Russian architects Arch Group envision the Sleepbox as a unit that could be rented for a period of time between fifteen minutes and a few hours, with bedding that would be automatically changed between users; it would be particularly useful for layovers that would normally result in travelers snoozing in uncomfortable chairs. Imagine if these units could be placed in cities, perhaps sponsored by the local community, for people who don’t have roofs over their heads.

Home Dome, Made of Packing Peanuts

(images via: green building elements)

Designed by a 12-year-old boy, the Home Dome makes use of a waste material that happens to provide a lot of insulation from the weather. For his entry in the Design Squad Trash to Treasure competition, Max Wallack won $10,000 and a Dell laptop computer for the structure, which is made of discarded plastic bags filled with styrofoam packing peanuts.

Shelter Cart by Zo-Loft Architecture & Design

(images via: treehugger)

Many homeless people gather discarded materials that have value, like aluminum cans, in bags or shopping carts in order to make a little bit of money. Designers Barry Sheehan and Gregor Timlin re-imagined the potential uses of that cart, creating a large, highly visible yellow push-cart that also functions as a shelter. The Shelter Cart – a submission in the 2006 DesignBoom social awareness competition – is not intended as a definitive answer to homelessness, but rather a way to raise awareness about the issue.

Pump and Jump

(images via: design boom)

Another idea that considers the need for many homeless people to push their personal items or gathered valuables around in a cart is the Pump and Jump. Designers Jeong-Yun Heo, Seong-Ho Kim and Chung Lee explain, “It’s a cart for a homeless who collect recycled things. We are have two concepts for the cart. First is pumping Air, second is fixing the box on the cart. A Homeless can rest in the shelter and store collections such as bottles, sheets of paper, cardboards, etc.”

Instant Housing by Urban Nomads

(images via: design buzz)

Tiny mobile homes that can easily be carried around by a single person, these Instant Housing Shelters by Urban Nomads consist of a metal container with a pop-out tent-like structure, fitted with wheels. The housing unit contains a retractable padded bed, a first aid kit, mirror, whistle, multi-tool, flashlight and a plastic hood with a viewing window. Affordable and easily transportable, the units could also be used for emergency housing in the event of a disaster, or recreational camping.

Homeless Health Care Clinic Made of Shipping Containers

(images via: inhabitat)

Homeless people need much more than shelters and even community support – they need health care, too. This concept by Co-Tain provides a simple health clinic made of shipping containers. Designed for the Paramore district of downtown Orlando, Florida, the Homeless Health Care Clinic is inexpensive to build, and sustainable.

Shelter Home for the Homeless by Javier Larraz

(images via: archdaily)

The Shelter Home for the Homeless also considers more than just putting a roof over the heads of people who don’t have one of their own. It aims to improve their quality of life, with a community that emphasizes social interaction. The shared spaces in this sleek design include leisure rooms and spaces for occupational workshops.

Mini Capsule Hotel by Atelier Van Lieshout

(images via: dezeen)

Like the SleepBox, the Mini Capsule Hotel was not designed as a solution for homeless housing, but it could be adapted for such a use. Atelier Van Lieshout created the six-bed dorm-style hotel for an outdoor installation at Design Miami in 2009. Its original purpose, in fact, was almost on the other end of the spectrum: the designers describe it as “a send up of the corporate VIP lounge/oasis” functioning as a place to crash during or after a party. Brad Pitt reportedly bought it for his private beach. But such capsule hotels could have a much more practical use in urban environments.