It starts with a plastic tarp, a woven polyethylene sheet, blue on one side and white on the other, about 18 square meters. Propped up on sticks or simply draped over whatever can be found, this becomes a dwelling; generally, four to six people are expected to live there.

Sometimes there are tents, though usually only enough for the most vulnerable - unattached women with children, for example. The tents measure about 16 square meters, or 170 square feet, and they, too, are meant to hold four to six: a family, or at least a household.

A cluster of 16 households makes a community; 16 communities form a block; 4 blocks are a sector; and 4 sectors are a camp. Four to six people in a flimsy structure measuring 13 feet by 13 feet, and next to them another, and then another, on to the horizon, a sea of blue and white forming a dense metropolis for displaced people.

There are scores of such camps dotting the surface of the planet, from Afghanistan to Poland, Burundi to Thailand, in Serbia, Nepal, Iran and Cambodia, a sort of semi-sovereign archipelago spread out around the world, managed by the United Nations and sustained by nongovernmental organizations. The people who live there are refugees, noncitizens confined to ad hoc cities, perhaps the purest form of a growing and global phenomenon: makeshift architecture, last-ditch living, emergency urbanism.

According to the UN, a refugee is anyone who has crossed an international border to escape persecution, and there are about 10 million of them worldwide, 14 million if you include Palestinians (who are considered a special case). The numbers are rough, though, and the definition is vague: a forced migration can be caused by anything from war to famine, and those who have huddled in some barren sanctuary in their own country - and are therefore officially classified as internally displaced people - are hardly better off than those who have managed to cross a line on a map.

Expanding the definition to include, in effect, everyone on the run who needs help, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees counts a total of 33 million people "of concern." Some have melted into neighboring countries; a great many have effectively disappeared. About 3.7 million make their way into camps.

Few governments want to see large colonies of destitute foreigners perched indefinitely upon their borders. For one thing, it is potentially destabilizing, since whatever conflict brought them there may well spill over; for another, it is a blight. So refugee camps are, in conception and by design, meant to be temporary, and the people who live there are discouraged from settling in.

The official position, then, is that repatriation is always imminent. But refugee crises have a way of lasting much longer than anyone wants to admit, still less to explicitly plan for. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. There have been Afghans stranded in northwestern Pakistan since the Soviet invasion of their country in the late '70s, and Sudanese and Somalis in Kakuma in Kenya since 1992.

This creates a number of problems, among them a sharp rise in overcrowding: a settlement growing at 4 percent a year - standard among displaced people - will almost double in size in 17 years, though the land allotted to them cannot be expected to increase.

The question remains whether there is anything about the design of refugee camps that could make them better. Consider, for example, the basic structure of camps: the tarp, the tent, the cluster, the grid. The fundamental unit assumes that the nuclear family is the basic unit of settlement worldwide, as it is in the Western countries from which most aid workers come. But in many communities, people live among their extended families, their tribes or their clans.

And the grid arrangement, too, replicates European notions of the rational city; it may not serve those cultures that originally organized themselves along more fluid lines. By the same token, Western notions of democratic space - each unit of housing equivalent to the next - may fit our own notions of fairness but prove disruptive to communities that are structured around an implicit or explicit ranking in honor, say, of town elders.

To take another quite simple fact, in some parts of the world people cook outside, while in others they cook inside. Some cultures make more of an issue of privacy, and some less. Some separate women and children from men, and some do not. And so on.

A deeper, if more diffuse, problem is built into the very idea of an encampment. Many refugees skip the camps altogether and make their way into capitals, like the 1.4 million Iraqi refugees who, since the U.S. invasion, have crossed into Syria. In some cases these are urban populations looking for an urban refuge; others are rural people who believe that cities are where the jobs are. Very often they end up homeless and unemployed beyond the UN's help.

The result is a kind of spontaneous urbanization that nongovernmental organizations simply do not know how to address. The numbers are startling, and the phenomenon is widespread.

Even Darfur, which most Westerners think of as desert, has three major cities. According to Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar attached to the Social Science Research Council in New York: "Five years ago, Darfur was 18 percent urbanized. It's now 65 percent urbanized, and it's unlikely it will drop below 50 percent. Most are squatting outside the cities on land that was previously farmland or forest land or had been used for something else. They tend to be new settlements that are very rapidly merged with the cities."

And the United Nations, as is often the case, is hamstrung by the limits of its mandate, forced to pretend that the obvious is not happening.

Refugee crises are usually seen as a stark example of the more general problem of disaster relief, but it may be more useful to see them in the context of the enormous new tide of urban migration, a trend that has created at least 26 cities worldwide with a population greater than 10 million.

This has created an ongoing housing emergency: megaslums, shantytowns, favelas, squatter's colonies. There are 80,000 people living on top of a garbage dump in Manila; a population of indeterminate size - perhaps as many as a million - who sleep every night in the cemeteries of Cairo; homeless encampments in San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston; guest workers camped beside the towers of the Persian Gulf; migrant workers in the San Fernando Valley. They are all displaced people.

One might ask where the architects are in all of this, the urbanists and city planners, the people who are trained to address this sort of thing.

There is a history and tradition that includes figures like Hassan Fathy, a Cairene architect who, starting in the 1930s, trained the poor of Egypt to build homes from mud bricks; Buckminster Fuller, with his geodesic domes; and Habitat for Humanity. There are pockets of inspired practice, like Architecture for Humanity, a remarkable NGO based in San Francisco that not only builds and consults but also acts as a sort of clearinghouse for open-source design.

Along the Mexican-U.S. border, Teddy Cruz has fashioned fast, cheap and inventive housing out of salvaged materials. Jaime Lerner, a Brazilian architect who became mayor of Curitiba, helped transform it from a slum-infested metropolis of almost two million into a green and functioning model of urban planning.

Still, aid organizations tend to be wary of alternate models for emergency housing, and not without reason. Tom Corsellis, a founder and the director of the British NGO Shelter Center, told me: "We get contacted by people every week or every month. And they're often very insistent or very pushy. They usually have never met a refugee and never worked for a humanitarian organization. But they somehow have found the answer that everyone else has missed for the past decade."

He paused for a moment, then added, "But it's our problem in not being able to define clear-enough specifications to engage their research and their creativity and their capacity to address this problem."

Those specifications are endlessly severe. On the scale at which the UN operates, there is an enormous difference between housing that costs $400 a unit and housing that costs $425 a unit, between materials that can be stored for years and materials that degrade; and if you can squeeze a hundred more of whatever it is into the hold of a cargo plane, so much the better.

It is one thing to design, say, an inflatable house; it is another to realize that it has to be cheap and easily transportable - preferably by camel or mule or on a man's back; it has to be durable enough to survive extreme weather; it has to be easily reparable; and besides, how are they going to inflate it if there is no electricity for pumps? Add in security, water access, HIV/AIDS prevention, human rights and a thousand other things, and the problem becomes unimaginably complex.

Almost everyone a reporter spoke to agreed that whatever solutions there may be will have to start with local knowledge, focusing and magnifying the ingenuity of individual communities rather than applying an architectural fiat from above. There are almost a billion people worldwide who live in makeshift housing or unplanned communities, off the grid, off the economy, off the map. How will they find shelter?

The world is short a billion homes. Now all we need are a few million architects to help build them.

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Phoenix Area Hydration and Refuge Stations
by Diana Balazs
The Arizona Republic

Sixty-nine facilities throughout the Valley have been designated as places where the homeless and others distressed by the heat can find water, shade and help this summer.

This is the third year for the program with even more locations offering relief this year, said Brande Mead, a human services planner with the Maricopa Association of Governments. Those affected by the heat can find bottled water, a cool place to find shelter and other services at the sites.

"Really the purpose is to prevent unnecessary heat-related deaths from people that otherwise are homeless and living on the streets," Mead said.

Mead said homeless shelters are full every night and the program provides another resource for people to get help.

The program was launched following the deaths of more than 30 people over the summer of 2005, including the homeless and those living in homes without air conditioning. It now includes assistance sites countywide.

"The community got together and just said we really need to have some other opportunities for people during the hot summer months," Mead said.

The hydration/refuge facilities include local charities such as St. Vincent de Paul, senior centers and churches.

Blue Swadener, a spokeswoman for St. Joseph the Worker, said there were 50 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County between May and September 2007.

St. Joseph the Worker is teaming up again this year with the Notre Dame Club of Phoenix to collect bottled water. The water drive will take place from 8 to 10 a.m. June 14 at the Safeway store at 48th Street and East Indian School Road in Phoenix. Water donations will be accepted all summer. Call 602-417-9854 for more information.

MAG's Continuum of Care Regional Committee on Homelessness has developed two maps of resources available for both those in need and for those who want to help.

The first map shows where the 69 water hydration stations and refuge locations are. The second shows water collection and donation sites in the county.

Items needed include water, sun block, lightweight clothing, and hats.

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Baltimore Wants to Shut Down Homeless Encampment
Lynn Anderson
Baltimore Sun

City officials are pushing once again to remove a homeless encampment outside a downtown Baltimore church, but the pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church says he’ll go to jail if necessary to stop them.

The latest salvos in the long-running dispute come just weeks after the city and church announced they’d come to an agreement that would allow social workers to enter the leafy park at the end of the Jones Falls Expressway to help connect the shantytown’s residents with government services and housing.

But city officials say the conditions in the camp are deplorable and need to be rectified. A recent survey of homeless people living there found that most – more than 80 percent – are likely to die within the next 7 years due to existing illnesses and poor living conditions. The non-profit that helped with the survey said the results were worse than any other homeless cluster they had surveyed, including camps in Los Angeles and New York City.

The St. Vincent parish has supported the homeless for years. Parish members refer to the park, which is church property, as a sanctuary.

But city officials are challenging that definition, as well as the church’s social idealism.

In May, officials asked the church to consider shutting down the park in an effort to encourage the homeless to go to shelters that offer medical services, job training and transition into permanent housing.

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City Counts its Homeless
and the numbers keep growing
Cold reality: As Melbourne's residential population rises,
more people are living on the streets.
Dewi Cooke
Melbourne

IN THIS weather, Melbourne looked otherworldly. Thick and dense, the fog dimmed street lights and soaked through clothes.

In the morning darkness, 120 City of Melbourne volunteers took to the streets to count one part of the inner-city's 3500 homeless population — the rough sleepers.

The Street Count, believed to be the first of its kind undertaken by a council in Victoria, was done between 5.30am and 8am across a small section of the city including the CBD, Fitzroy and Flagstaff gardens and North and West Melbourne.

In that short space of time, 90 people were found to be sleeping rough. Some were clustered under cardboard in the Flagstaff Gardens. Another person was asleep under blankets. Others were found on Spencer and Flinders streets.

Volunteers did not enter known squats, rooming houses or derelict buildings so the count was restricted to people sleeping in the open.

"If it had been a little bit earlier in the year it would probably have been a little more than that because the cold weather forces people into squats," Cr David Wilson said. "I wasn't surprised that there were 90 there and I think this is a part of the shame that a place like Australia has homeless people at all."

Most of those observed were men. In Victoria, an estimated 9% of the 20,000 people who are homeless each night are living in "improvised dwellings". The rest are living in transitional accommodation, rooming houses or dossing with friends or relatives.

Those who chose to participate were asked survey questions including how long had they been staying in their current location; how many places had they slept in during the past month and, if they were on the waiting list for public housing, how long had they been waiting.

Further surveys were undertaken by homeless agencies during the day.

Cr Wilson said that when final results of the Street Count are handed down in August, a target and timeline for reducing homelessness in the municipality would be one of his goals. Results will feed into the council's homeless policy and form the third part of its homelessness research project.

Estimates have put the homeless population in Australia at 100,000 — a figure described by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a "national obscenity".

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Focus on Tent Cities

The National Coalition for the Homeless News will now feature a regular Focus feature. Each Focus article will deal with a different aspect of homelessness in the United States and the struggle to end it. If there’s a topic you would like to see covered in Focus, please email swaite@nationalhomeless.org.

In some communities, people experiencing homelessness have sought shelter in tent cities. A tent city is a temporary housing facility, somewhat like a shantytown. As the term would indicate, however, tent cities are made up exclusively of tents (though these can run the gamut from the very rudimentary to cabin-like structures employing a tent as a roof). They’re also distinct in that they are sometimes established or sponsored by homeless service organizations.

Currently, the best-known tent citie s in the U.S. are Tent City 3 and Tent City 4, located in the Seattle area and sponsored by the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort and Women’s Housing Equality and Enhancement League (SHARE/WHEEL). These settlements came into being as a result of a long legal battle following the city’s shutting down of two that SHARE/WHEEL had previously established. Although 2004 county commission’s report on the Tent Cities noted their usefulness in overcoming the area’s shelter shortage, their presence is still opposed by some nearby residents.

Some other U.S. tent cities have included those erected by FEMA and U.S. Navy Seabees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as well as that in St. Petersburg, FL, which resided from 2006-2007 on the property of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul; and currently include Camp Quixote in Olympia, Washington and Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon. More recently, the BBC has reported the erection of tent cities i n Los Angeles in response to the current foreclosure crisis.

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Wyoming Winds is published by the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless
907 Logan Avenue
Cheyenne, WY 82001-5247
phone: 307-634-8499
fax: 307-634-9089
email: wch@vcn.com
Views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless, its staff or board.

Editor for this issue: Virginia Sellner.
Copyrights revert back to the author upon publication.
WCH is a 501(c)(3) non-profit agency depending upon the community for funding.
© 2008.
**In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.**

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