Refugee shelter

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Refugee shelters include the most basic kind of structure created in the aftermath of a conflict or natural disaster as a temporary residence for victims who have lost or abandoned their homes. There is a continuum ranging from the most temporary tent accommodation through transitional shelter to rebuilding houses and settlements. Land tenure issues often play a large role in the planning and categorisation of settlements as temporary, though many settlements subsist for years.

The materials and technology used to create these shelters have advanced as a result of worldwide news coverage of natural disasters in the new millennium. Simple tent structures, grouped together to form a "tent city", are commonly made of canvas military issue tents which are criticised for being heavy, bulky, uninsulated, expensive, and for rotting in under a year.

There are scores of innovative approaches to constructing temporary shelters, but few make it to the field. Architect Shigeru Ban has designed temporary (and permanent) structures with paper tubes as the underlying structure, used after the Kobe earthquake . Cal-Earth Institute has also developed "superadobe" which makes use of sandbags and barbed wire to form an emergency shelter for disaster relief.

The main difficulty with refugee shelters is transporting the materials to areas with damaged infrastructure, so the overall cost of deploying a shelter is largely proportional to its weight.

Disaster responses are increasingly focusing on supporting victims to build their own shelters as this stimulates the local economy, maintains dignity, gives victims something other than their grief to focus on, and encourages a sense of ownership of the shelter and of the materials.