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

截至2021年底，全球有8400万人因危机、冲突和灾害而被迫流离失所（UNHCR, 2021）。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，住房市场紧缩的“缓慢危机”，以及最近的战争，也迫使全球北方许多国家越来越多的人背井离乡。实际上，提供住房是危机管理和人道主义行动的关键组成部分。为了使应急住房在全球范围内快速流通，通常的做法是以应急包的形式分发：装满与住房、食品、保健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，准备在灾害发生时立即分发。最近，这种住房套件引起了一系列企业家、初创企业甚至宜家的注意，他们正在加入老牌人道主义行动者，重新设计住房技术，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统一关于普遍基本需要和全球流动的一般负担能力的想法，另一方面试图统一关于当地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如何在实践中发挥作用。正是基于这些理由，该项目试图调查由住房技术建立的不稳定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，不仅在提供住所方面，而且在产生人道主义和生物政治的新模式方面。通过多地点的实地考察，我们将解决人道主义设计空间中住房套件的生产，它们在人道主义后勤中的流动，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政实践，我们将加深我们对人道主义实践的理解，以及在使用住房技术的地方共同创造的不稳定空间。此外，通过跟踪住房技术在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展到全球南方以外的地点。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，同时挑战了南北地理划分的概念二分法，实际上遵循了对更平等和全球地理理论化的呼吁。

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.