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

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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.