Humanitarian Crisis: Design for the 90% o the World Population
Type: Publication
Location: Patras, Greece
Project Team: Mariada Stamouli
Status: Completed
Since 1900 a large number of natural and manmade disasters have left millions of people either homeless or living in unacceptable living conditions. Nowadays, 90% of the population lives on the edge of a massive humanitarian crisis, while a great number of citizens of this world do not have access to basic goods such as food and water. Acknowledging the magnitude of the problem and the increasing incidence of such phenomena, there are questions that automatically arise. For whom do we learn to design? Is there an architecture that meets the needs of this remaining 90% of the World’s population? In order to answer to these questions, it is very important to define the term “humanitarian crisis”, which are the factors that lead to its emergence and why is the intervention of the architect crucial and necessary. After relating architecture to humanitarian crisis, there is an analysis of the two most dominant movements that attempted to give solutions to sheltering issues of the 20th century; modernism and self-shelter movement. Afterwards, the main study area is the humanitarian crisis as it is evolved in 21st century , as well as the way of action of some contemporary architectural groups, which main goal is to provide a basic shelter , to all those people who are in need, under a more humanitarian approach. Finally, eight major and significant case studies from eight different architectural groups and organizations are presented.
