Shelter technologies in action: Humanitarian geographies of precarious housing across North-South divides

实践中的住房技术：跨越南北鸿沟的不稳定住房的人道主义地理

• 批准号: 513747054
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Nadine Marquardt
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Geographisches Institut
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/513747054?language=en
• 关键词: Shelter; technologies; action; Humanitarian; geographies

By the end of 2021, 84 million persons across the world had been forcibly displaced from their homes because of crises, conflicts, and disasters (UNHCR, 2021). Overall, countries in the Global South host the majority of disaster-hit persons. Nevertheless, climate change-related events, such as storms, floods, and wildfires, the “slow crisis” of tightening housing markets, and most recently, war, also force growing numbers of people out of their homes in many countries of the Global North. In effect, the provision of shelter forms a key component of crisis management and humanitarian action. To allow for the fast circulation of emergency shelter around the globe, it is common practice to distribute them in the form of emergency kits: Boxes filled with standardized equipment related to housing, food, health and sanitation, stockpiled at well-connected logistical nodes ready for distribution as soon as disaster strikes. Recently, such shelter kits have gained the attention of a range of entrepreneurs, start-ups and even IKEA, who are joining established humanitarian actors to redesign shelter technologies to maximise their deployability in a large variety of contexts. For this to be possible, the composition of shelter kits attempts to unite ideas about universal basic needs and the general affordances of global mobility on the one hand, and locally specific regulations and demands on the other. However, it remains unclear how these visions and assumptions play out in practice. It is on these grounds that this project seeks to investigate the humanitarian spaces of precarious housing set up by shelter technologies. The aim is to critically engage with the effects of these technologies not just in providing shelter, but also in giving rise to new modes of humanitarianism and biopolitics. Through multi-sited fieldwork, we will address the production of shelter kits in spaces of humanitarian design, their im/mobilities within humanitarian logistics, and the humanitarian spaces in which they come to be used. By linking these, we will first be able to retrace and question the biopolitical visions that inform the design of shelter technologies. Second, we will trace how these technologies are (re)shaped by the material demands of global preparedness supply chains. And third, by focusing on people’s lived experiences and practices of homemaking, we will deepen our understanding of humanitarian practices and the precarious spaces that shelter technologies co-create where they are deployed. Moreover, by following shelter technologies to different sites of use in Northern Europe and Eastern Africa, the project expands the empirical research on humanitarian technologies to sites beyond the Global South. This way, the project pinpoints the ambivalence between universal needs and local specificity while challenging the conceptual dichotomies of North-South divides in geography and, in effect, follows calls for a more equal and global geographical theorizing.

截至2021年底，全世界有8400万人因危机、冲突和灾害被迫离开家园（联合国难民署，2021年）。总体而言，全球南方国家收容了大多数受灾人口。然而，与气候变化相关的事件，如风暴、洪水和野火，紧缩住房市场的“缓慢危机”，以及最近的战争，也迫使越来越多的人离开家园。实际上，提供住房是危机管理和人道主义行动的一个关键组成部分。为了使紧急避难所能够在地球仪各地快速流通，通常的做法是以应急包的形式分发：装满与住房、食品、健康和卫生有关的标准化设备的箱子，储存在连接良好的后勤节点，以便在灾害发生时立即分发。最近，这种避难所套件引起了一系列企业家、初创企业甚至宜家的关注，他们正在加入老牌人道主义行动者的行列，重新设计避难所技术，以最大限度地提高其在各种情况下的可部署性。为了做到这一点，住房包的组成一方面试图将普遍的基本需求和全球流动的一般可能性与当地具体的规定和要求结合起来。然而，目前尚不清楚这些设想和假设在实践中如何发挥作用。正是基于这些理由，本项目力求调查住房技术所建立的危险住房的人道主义空间。其目的是批判性地参与这些技术的影响，不仅在提供住所，而且在产生新的人道主义和生物政治模式。通过多地点实地考察，我们将解决在人道主义设计的空间中生产庇护包，它们在人道主义后勤中的不可移动性，以及它们将被使用的人道主义空间。通过将这些联系起来，我们将首先能够追溯和质疑为住房技术设计提供信息的生物政治愿景。其次，我们将追踪这些技术是如何被全球准备供应链的物质需求所（重新）塑造的。第三，通过关注人们的生活经历和家务实践，我们将加深对人道主义实践的理解，以及住房技术在部署地点共同创造的不稳定空间。此外，通过跟踪北方和东非不同使用地点的住房技术，该项目将人道主义技术的实证研究扩大到全球南部以外的地点。通过这种方式，该项目指出了普遍需求和地方特殊性之间的矛盾，同时挑战了地理上南北划分的概念二分法，实际上，遵循了更平等和全球地理理论的呼吁。