Sustainable Settlements Charrette: Rethinking Encampments for Refugees and Displaced Populations

10 – 14 February 2002, El Capitan Canyon, Santa Barbara, California

Introduction

The average modern American knows virtually nothing about refugees. Yet in any given year, there are tens of millions of refugees in the poor nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As humankind proceeds quickly into the 21st century, this group of people could become the most deserving of our attention simply because it’s likely their numbers will grow. Continuing desertification of sub-Saharan regions, climate change and rising sea levels, ongoing resource shortages, and the violence resulting from such shortages, will all be felt by the poorest members of society first.

The UN estimates that worldwide it cares for an estimated 22 million refugees; but that number, agency officials are quick to point out, might represent only half of all refugees. Some refugees are dispossessed for only a few weeks or months. Others have held their status for years. Some have even been refugees for several generations.

The camps that refugees come to call home can be awful, which is no surprise. When disaster, war and shortages prompt refugees to flee one place they often do so by the thousands or tens of thousands, even by the hundreds of thousands in stunningly short periods of time. For example, between 1990 and 93 (three years), 100,000 Bhutanese asylum-seekers fled into southeastern Nepal; between 1992 and 97 (five years), Tanzania received 800,000 refugees from Burundi and Rwanda; and between July and October 1994 (four months), 730,000 refugees fled Rwanda for Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the most compelling examples of such high-speed mass movement is probably the April 1994, mass exodus of 250,000 Rwandans—fleeing ethnic violence—who crossed the border into remote Northwestern Tanzania in two days.

Aid workers are pressed to erect tent cities within weeks, even days. Water, food, clothing and order must all be obtained immediately, then an ongoing source for these basics must be established. Not surprisingly, the business of taking care of refugees is falling more and more on military organizations, which have the skill and discipline to deploy quickly and create order out of situations that might otherwise progress into anarchy.

How these refugees are handled, and the way in which their habitations are established, is becoming of greater interest in both military circles and among aid organizations. One man who has become deeply involved with refugee camps and populations is Dr. Eric Rasmussen, of the U.S. Navy. Rasmussen’s work in refugee settlements has shown him that the aid being brought to refugees can create problems as big or bigger than the issues being addressed.

"When refugee camps are set up," Rasmussen notes, "the urgent circumstances require that the basics of food, water, shelter, and safety be delivered just as quickly as possible or lives can be lost. Because the responsibilities for sectors are split across many agencies, isolated answers to a single problem are often the result. Unfortunately, despite superb efforts and many saved lives, the resulting infrastructure is often less than ideal and becomes semi-permanent. Such dis-connected coordination can cause seemingly foolish problems that are invisible until you work out in the camps.

"At one camp in Africa, for example, one aid agency delivered drinking water from a 5-cm pump spouts while another agency provided plastic water containers with 3-cm openings. These particular refugees weren’t familiar with funnels, so the simple mismatch resulted in thousands of gallons of spilt water. The spilt water created a mudhole. The mudhole was fixed when a different aid agency laid a cement slab with a sluice leading to a shallow collecting pond for the spilt water runoff, rather than coordinate a fix for the spout-jerrycan mismatch. The result for the refugees was a mosquito-infested pond 30 feet from the water pump and a 40% malaria rate in those who used that site to pump their drinking water. This is a design problem."

A Refugee Primer

Organized refugee care is a fairly new phenomenon. In modern times, it was at the end of World War II—when an estimated 40 million Europeans were displaced—that the world community began looking at and understanding the plight of the dispossessed. In 1951, a UN meeting in Geneva wrote an international treaty, the 1951 Refugee Convention, which defined a refugee and outlined "the minimum humanitarian standards for the treatment of refugees."

Officially, a refugee is a person who "is outside her/his country of origin (or habitual residence, in the case of stateless persons) and who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is unable or unwilling to avail herself/himself of the protection to which s/he is entitled."

The problem with the 1951 Convention definition, according to David Stone of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) and Larry Thompson of Refugees International is that the UN definition leaves out quite a few folks, notably people uprooted within their own countries, so-called "internally displaced persons" (IDPs). Further confusing matters in Afghanistan—where RMI’s sustainable designs might first be applied—there are "old" and "new" refugees, according to Thompson.

An estimated four million "old" refugees resulted from the Russian occupation and war of the late 1970s and 1980s; the new refugees were displaced by more recent fighting and a 1999–2001 drought. In late 2001, a vast new flood of refugees was feared in the wake of U.S. military action, but international efforts to deliver relief aid inside Afghanistan, enabling Afghans to remain in their homes, were relatively successful.

Not all "refugees" are created equal. The roughly one million Afghan IDPs who could not cross international borders in 2000 and 2001 (partly because neighboring countries closed their borders) don’t have the same rights as international refugees, and are often aided in only a minimal fashion or not at all. Moreover, many refugees are overlooked by the main humanitarian efforts because they integrate quickly into local populations, as have many Afghan refugees who have fled to Iran and Pakistan.

The camps that refugees wind up in are usually in poor nations, and they enormously burden local societies, economies, and ecosystems, leading to a swarm of problems. Armed militia and guerrilla factions sometimes infiltrate camps and terrorize refugees; violence against women, children, and other vulnerable people is common. Sometimes those hired to run the camps come from a local population that has been at war with the refugees, prompting severe mistreatment. Locals outside the camp often resent the international aid the refugees receive, and steal whatever they can from the camp inhabitants.

Sometimes the refugees themselves don’t trust the aid—as workers in Sudan found when refugee mothers refused to feed their starving children because they feared the food was poisoned. Refugees are sometimes inadvertently given food, supplies, and fuels that break cultural or religious mores. Sometimes they’re given food that requires considerable cooking, prompting energy-related problems like deforestation.

Even local governments can throw up obstacles. At one African camp, the UN wanted to initiate several environmental projects. The national government—which had been charging rich Western humanitarian groups big money simply to gain access to refugees within its borders—demanded $20 million from the UN to begin work. The UN refused and eventually gained access to the camp, but such extortion adds one more complex problem to the mix.

According to Refugees International’s Thompson, a typical refugee camp can house 10,000 people, but camps may have hundreds of thousands of residents, as was the case with Rwandan camps in the Congo in the mid-1990s—one of which grew to 600,000. Refugee camps are supposed to be temporary, but unresolved conflicts often make it difficult for refugees to go home, and the camps can remain for decades.

A Rethinking of the Design Issue

As Dr. Rasmusen notes, design is at the center of many refugee camp problems, but the answer might not simply be to hire new designers. Some of the issues go far beyond poor communications about projects shared by aid agencies. There are endless stories from refugee camps where well-meaning aid organizations have provided advanced technological devices, the best foodstuffs, and other new, expensive materials that simply do not match the economic, educational, cultural, and geographic realities of the situation. Rather, Dr. Rasmussen feels strongly that such situations call for an overlapping integration of players from diverse backgrounds. He felt the sustainability community's approach of understanding a entire system before attempting a "solution," might be an the appropriate approach in refugee settlements.

Properly combined, today’s best innovative practices can often provide for basic human needs—clean water, food, sanitation, shelter, security, light, refrigeration, telecommunications, medical care, and education—in ways that support prior populations, check the spread of poverty-inducing conditions, and restore vital habitat and infrastructure. Moreover, applying key insights from other disciplines can even help to create a sound sociology, an entrepreneurial micro-economy, and a sense of dignity and self-worth.

Combining many proven solutions, normally deployed only singly, should yield very important synergies. Making the skills and techniques scaleable and portable—so refugees can take them home to help with rebuilding—could make repatriation more likely, more successful and a nucleus for national development. And if this can be done in refugee camps, it should also help some two billion or more other people seeking to create sustainable settlement in austere conditions.

In mid-February 2002, Old Snowmass’s Rocky Mountain Institute partnered with Dr. Rasmussen, to rethink refugee-and-displaced-persons settlements from scratch. A number of other groups were involved in the event, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Refugees International, the UN Development Programme, the World Food Programme, the U.S. State Department, the Departments of Energy and Defense, among many other NGOs, government departments, and individual specialists.

The event, officially called the "Sustainable Settlements" charrette1, took place at El Capitan Canyon, a rustic camp and retreat center near Santa Barbara, California. Use of El Capitan Canyon was donated and the event generously hosted by co-owner Chuck Blitz. Other costs were borne by generous grants from private donors, chiefly Betty Williams, John and Judy Harding, Kathleen Barry and Bob Burnett, and Adam and Rachel Albright.

The charrette was aimed at bringing together leaders from the aid community with some of the best integrative design practitioners for sustainable development to seek ways to manage refugee settlements more effectively. Often problems arise from well-meant but dis-integrated solutions.

Developing Projects

So what would you do, if, say, you had a sudden three- or four-month-long influx of 100,000 people into your community, all of whom needed your immediate help? Or 200,000 people? How about half a million?

The 84 attendees at the charrette formed working groups covering all the issues of concern to the UNHCR—energy, site, water and sanitation, communications, education, health, economic development, food and nutrition, construction and shelter—and were charged to envision three projects that could be implemented within 6 months. They were also given a theoretical location for their efforts: the community of Spin Boldak, where an encampment formed in late 2001 with nearly 10,000 IDPs (mainly women and children) near the Afghan-Pakistan border, where there is the possibility of using ideas from the charrette in a real-life setting. (Ideas generated from this charrette might also be applied along the U.S.-Mexico border, in rebuilding Kabul, and in many other settings.)

Some of the results were revolutionary—food, for example. It arrives in all sorts of packaging, most of which is discarded. But boxes of aid materials, for example, could be impregnated with crop seeds and spores of fungi that help them gather nutrients and hold soil. Each box panel can fit a region and season, ready to plant and create a kitchen or market garden just by putting it on the ground and watering it. Charrette participant Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti is already talking to packaging firms about making such boxes.

How about education? Such a "seed box" could deliver a "School-in-a-Box"—another charrette idea, supplying refugees with camp information, learning materials and school curriculum, gardening supplies, solar toys, solar-power information, you name it.

Even some of the simplest—but currently unapplied—ideas could be helpful in camps.

"The first project our group developed was an assessment of the refugees themselves, an inventory of the human resources," noted RMI’s Michael Kinsley, Economic Group facilitator. "There’s a lot of brainpower that comes into these camps, and camp organizers should be tapping into that resource." Not only does an assessment provide humanitarian agencies with information about the population, Kinsley noted, it could empower the refugees themselves, by building self-esteem and getting them involved with camp projects. It also helps prepare them for their return home. And if the inventory goes on a smart card rather than a simpler ID card, it can also represent an unstealable personal store of value (set up with microcredit when you register) to jump-start local commerce.

An Energetic Flow of Ideas

The individual projects the charrette produced were impressive (greater details are below and in the individual discussion streams), but it was the way in which complementary knowledge and experience was connected and woven together that made this design process unique. A poignant example of this came from the charrette’s Energy Group, which comprised technology and fuels experts, solar and adobe experts, and experienced aid workers.

On their first day, group members pondered how to get the most heat and light from various fuels, and which fuels were appropriate. They came up with some good ideas, but the arrival of Afghan refugee Fauzia Assifi and an Afghan-experienced nurse-anthropologist caused the group to refine good ideas into great ones.

Afghan families, Assifi explained, are accustomed to heating their feet and lower legs by sitting together (sandelei) around a table, covered with a heavy quilt, with a small charcoal brazier (manqal) underneath—an arrangement similar to the Japanese kotatsu. The brazier, containing coals covered with ash, stays hot for many hours. Afghans cook, eat, and share each other’s company around the manqal and often go to sleep in the same positions by leaving their legs under the brazier-warmed quilt and stretching out on their sleeping mats.

Building on Fauzia’s information, the Energy Group decided that a new type of brazier insert might be in order. Fueling it—and an efficient stove/pot combination for cooking—with LPG (bottled gas) could greatly decrease the environmental damage resulting from cooking with fuelwood (and then trying to heat people with the same cooking fire). It could free up the vast fuelwood gathering time required of women and children, so they could further their education or earn more, and could avoid landmines and attackers while foraging for firewood. It would also eliminate indoor smoke, and therefore eye damage, which is chronic in Afghanistan, without many of the risks of kerosene. A trickle brazier that uses only a tiny amount of LPG would thus provide personal warmth to family groups in the evening and at night in cold climates, in a way that reinforces family cohesion and traditional practices.

The Energy Group took the discussion even further by hypothesizing that such new technology might stir the interest of gas, oil, and LPG companies—such as those now emerging in Afghanistan—which could see new markets created through technologies introduced for refugees. The discussion was rich and deep.

The roughly two dozen projects developed were then considered on an integrated basis, taking cultural and technological appropriateness, and resource preservation into account. Yet, as the working groups pondered their projects, it became apparent that there are several larger ideals humanitarian agencies must follow. (See EMERGING THEMES, below.)

Where Do We Go From Here?

The Sustainable Settlements charrette was not undertaken to produce floorplans for camp buildings and design drawings for new cooking devices; rather, its purpose was to create a settlement design methodology and template for quickly helping displaced people—in short, a primer for aid workers. This report and several articles authored by various participants and available on several websites, as well as the websites themselves, are one outcome of the event. However, there are several other possible destinations for the information shared and the ideas and projects generated at the charrette.

First, representatives from several large aid organizations have expressed interest in the outcome of the charrette, including the UNHCR, UN Development Programme, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, Refugees International, US AID and others. Also, according to Dr. Rassmussen, there is interest possibly using the ideas for domestic sites within the United States—in depressed or marginal communities.

Second, the President of the Massachusetts's Institute of Technology (MIT) recently mandated that the university look for "expeditionary" opportunities and find people active on field projects and promote and support the work being done in those projects. "It might be an architect building a small community in Turkey, it might be a geologist working in Nepal," explained MIT’s Mike Hawley, noting that MIT is interested in "tugging up those projects, giving them better visibility, funding, resources, and real incentives to synthesize the kinds of skills that are needed across traditional boundaries in the university."

Additionally, MIT has an "entrepreneurship competition" in which local venture capitalists assemble prize money, then examine various projects going on at the university. The projects are developed with business plans and then entered into a competition with $50,000 in prize money. Six winning plans are funded. Some go onto to become viable businesses. Hawley felt this type of approach might be one way to get some of the charrette projects moving, quickly.

Third, there is interest from the North American Development Bank (www.nad bank.org/english/program_service/beif/beif_frame.htm) in experimenting with sustainable refugee camps along the U.S.-Mexico border—where "a constant flow of refugees," according to author Alan Weisman, are present. The bank has reportedly set aside $23 billion for such activities.

The Projects

The projects developed by the eight working groups at the charrette are only briefly described below. To get a fuller picture of how they addressed some of the questions and challenges developed using the charrette template (www.rmi.org/images/other/Con-ProjTemplate.pdf), as well as the perceived potential problems associated with the projects, please read each group’s discussion notes, which can be found at:

Emergent Themes

Although the working groups' projects might appear rather simplistic at first blush, it is important to consider that there are a number of very important themes and goals that cut across all the projects and unified them in special ways. Such qualities were not well represented in the descriptions of individual projects, nor in the group discussion notes, so they are briefly described here.

First, all charrette participants agreed that the refugees themselves should be encouraged to lead efforts to provide aid. They know their cultures, their religions and regions and desires better than any Western aid worker. Having refugees lead their own efforts in all eight areas (energy, site, water and sanitation, communications, education, health, economic development, food and nutrition) not only builds esteem in the refugees, but it assures that well-intentioned help doesn't get mis-applied.

Second, the help must be appropriate—culturally, religiously, economically, technologically, geographically, and in terms of resources. And while all these projects acknowledged that, they all point to a strong emphasis toward education, both for aid workers and the refugees. Learning is the basis for all good, solid, appropriate work. "Cultural imperialism" is a habit we should all strive to avoid.

Third, aid should be coordinated from the start, and throughout the displacement period of the refugees in all areas. As has been briefly seen, some of the projects meet each other across a topic-area boundary—the "School-in-a-Box" and the "seed box" are an immediate example, whereby the ideals of the food group join with the goals of the Education Group to meet a need in a sustainable manner. Such coordination is extremely important; after all, it was a lack of coordination that prompted RMI’s charrette in the first place.

And finally, the projects themselves must be more fully developed. How they leverage one another, support cultural goals, enhance the environment, the economy, and the lives of these poor dispossessed people must be completely understood before they are taken out and tried. As the UNHCR's David Stone put it, "Please do not try and take any untested or unproven techniques or tools or to a refugee setting and certainly not to an IPD setting in which the infrastructure is less supporting than in many refugee camps. There's a lot of things we need to do before we can take some of these individual activities, put them together and deliver them whole to IDP or refugee camps."

Regardless of exactly where the results go, charrette participants will continue the ongoing healthy, rich dialogue and share it with whatever other individuals organizations and governments are interested. Unfortunately, the future of refugee camp business is strong. As the World Health Organization has noted, "almost two billion people—one-third of humanity—were affected by natural disasters in the last decade of the 20th century. Floods and droughts accounted for 86 percent of them." Add to that coming climate change, future wars and resource shortages, and it becomes apparent that unfortunately, the demand for clean, healthy, habitable, and sustainable settlements is going to go up, not down.

By Cameron M. Burns
©2002 Rocky Mountain Institute
RMI's William Browning, Huston Eubank, Thammy Evans, Alexis Karolides, Christina Page, and Ben Shepherd contributed to this report.