Yesterday, several news stories appeared regarding the placement, planning, and construction efforts for the rebuilding of shelter for the displaced Haitians. Common to the articles was the tension that exists between the need for immediate housing, what will happen as settlements become increasingly more defined as places, and the need for more permanent solutions with the upcoming hurricane season. (See: Miami Herald, NYT)
In the current paradigm, the top image shows what relief agencies are moving away from, and the bottom image shows what they are moving towards:
© Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
© Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
While the tents of the state apparatus are likely more durable, the essential schematic is unchanged, and the Haitians cease to have agency in the construction of their dwellings. Haitian families are often quite large, and extended relatives live together. The tents, being one size fits all solutions, do not recognize the socio-cultural demands of the population. Planning and design are effective and powerful when they address a need fit to a specific demand or problem, rather than applying a blanket application or solution. Efforts are being made to try and supply lumber and building materials, but these efforts are overshadowed by immediate needs, and the relative ease of dispatching tarps and tents. But I have veered somewhat off-course. Neither settlement paradigm has infrastructure – power, sanitation, water.
The NYT had an editorial on Jan. 31 that echoes Arch. for Humanity and some of the discussion on Wired’s excellent Haiti Rewired Ning network. All of the former sites, and I, recognize the need to create new spaces and address the infrastructural – the hard needs – of Haiti, with the critical attribute of working with Haitians, rather than throwing design at them. In my Core studio last semester, we were approached with the theoretical framework of thinking of design situations as an “opportunity-constraint” performance metric. InfraNet Lab has a short piece here that echo’s that sentiment. In both my education, and the InfraNet Lab piece, the need to extend and distance ourselves from a binary problem-solution metric is emphasized. This approach is critical to crisis situations, which have multi-variable complex dynamisms – social, cultural, infrastructural, weather, governmental, economic – factors that change daily. The idea that I would like to end on is that we as designers are talented at designing for the world that we have, designing for one second ago. Crisis design and meaningful design demands that we articulate the as-yet-unimagined, for the world that we do not yet have, and for the world that we want.
