Building a Better Life

Imagine waking up to find that your town has become a war zone. Your neighborhood is being bombed, and it’s no longer safe to sleep in your own bed. What would your family do?

For millions of people around the world, a situation like that is a reality—and their only choice is to flee. Indeed, the United Nations (U.N.) estimates that nearly 60 million people are currently displaced worldwide, ­having been driven from their homes by war or ­persecution. Many are refugees as a result of a violent civil war that has torn apart Syria since 2011. Millions of people have also run from their homes in Somalia, Afghanistan, and other unstable countries.

Many of these displaced people end up in refugee camps in their home country or abroad. Life may be safer there, but it’s rarely easy. Nearly 3.5 million refugees live in tents; millions more live in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting. Neither kind of shelter is likely to last for more than a year, if that.

To improve life in refugee camps, engineers have been working to design temporary houses that are safer, more comfortable, and more durable. Their mission is especially critical because the average refugee stays at a camp for 12 years.

“Refugees often don’t have permission to build anything permanent, and their home countries could be at war for years,” says Johan Karlsson, a project manager for Refugee Housing Unit (RHU), a company based in Sweden.

To help, Karlsson and RHU began working with the furniture company IKEA to design better shelters.

“We wanted to build something more like a house with a strong frame that can withstand snow and storms,” says Karlsson.

They also wanted the structure to last for several years. This meant finding a material that was durable, light­weight, and inexpensive. One reason refugee shelters don’t last is that the sun’s ultra­violet (UV) rays break down their plastic parts. Stronger materials, like steel, are expensive and too heavy to ship.

Karlsson worked with ­materials scientists to find an alternative: a plastic called poly­olefin foam, commonly used in food con­tainers. Inexpensive and light­weight, it isn’t damaged by UV rays.

Karlsson used it to build a shelter that can be packed in a cardboard box and assembled on site, just like IKEA furniture. The design is modular, meaning that its various parts can be installed independently, without having to start over if something breaks. (For example, if a window cracks, it can easily be replaced.) The shelter is 188 square feet—twice as large as most refugee tents and big enough to comfortably house five people.

The shelter also has a metallic fabric cover that reflects sunlight during the day but traps heat at night to help regulate the temperature inside. A solar panel on the roof generates electricity to power a light and electronic devices.

In 2013, after three years of develop­ing the shelters, Karlsson and the IKEA team tested them at refugee camps for Syrians in Iraq and Somalis in Ethiopia. Karls­son’s biggest concern was whether people would be able to successfully put the shelters together.

“We knew something like this would work in Sweden because we have IKEA, but would it work with Somalian refugees, who aren’t used to assembling IKEA products?” he says. “We were worried the project would turn into a bunch of parts scattered around the desert.”

But the refugees picked up on the project quickly. They assembled more than two dozen shelters. As families began living in them, they provided Karlsson with feedback.

Their comments helped the design team make improvements, such as allowing the doors to be installed in whichever wall panel a family prefers. But other improvements are made by the new tenants themselves: Families paint the inside panels for decoration and even put down carpets. “They work hard to make [the shelters] their own,” says Karlsson.

Today, the original test shelters are still holding up well. Better yet, the U.N. has also joined IKEA as a partner in the effort to produce the shelters, now known as Better Shelters. In March, the U.N. placed the first big order: 10,000 units to be used for refugee and disaster aid around the world.

Better Shelters have now been delivered to Ethiopia, Greece, Macedonia, Iraq, and Nepal—all places where people are in dire need of safe, secure housing. ­Karlsson hopes that the shelters will bring them some comfort.

“I can only imagine what it’s like to flee your home, leaving everything behind,” he says. “To give refugees a place to call home is profoundly meaningful.”