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

到2021年底，全世界有8400万人因危机、冲突和灾害被迫流离失所(难民署，2021年)。总体而言，全球南部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，房地产市场收紧的“缓慢危机”，以及最近的战争，也迫使越来越多的人在全球北部的许多国家背井离乡。实际上，提供庇护所是危机管理和人道主义行动的一个重要组成部分。为了使紧急避难所能够在全球范围内快速流通，通常的做法是以紧急避难所的形式分发这些避难所：装满与住房、食品、健康和卫生相关的标准化设备的盒子，储存在连接良好的物流节点，准备在灾难发生时立即分发。最近，这样的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参与者的行列，重新设计避难所技术，以最大限度地提高它们在各种环境中的可部署性。要做到这一点，避难所的组成一方面试图统一关于普遍的基本需求和全球流动的普遍负担能力的想法，另一方面则试图统一关于地方具体规定和要求的想法。然而，目前尚不清楚这些愿景和假设在实践中是如何实现的。正是基于这些理由，该项目寻求调查通过住房技术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，不仅是在提供庇护所方面，而且在产生新的人道主义和生物政治模式方面。通过多地点实地工作，我们将解决人道主义设计空间中避难所工具包的生产问题，它们在人道主义后勤中的流动性，以及它们将在其中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指导避难所技术设计的生物政治愿景。其次，我们将追踪这些技术是如何被全球备灾供应链的物质需求(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做法以及住房技术在部署地点共同创造的不稳定空间的理解。此外，通过将住房技术推广到北欧和东非的不同使用地点，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，该项目明确了普遍需求和地方特殊性之间的矛盾，同时挑战了地理上的南北二分法，实际上是响应了对更加平等和全球地理理论的呼声。

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.