“My name is Sidra. I am 12 years old… I have lived here in the Zaatari camp in Jordan for the last year and a half.”

Filmmaker Chris Milk took his empathy machine and virtual reality concept to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. This is where a majority of Syrian refugees have fled to, and a couple of Green Prophet writers have been leading projects to mitigate the suffering. His new virtual reality film can help us imagine standing in their shoes and see and feel more about the lives of these vulnerable people.

Milk is using Virtual Reality (VR) technology to increase our emotional bandwidth beyond what was possible in movies. VR technology has been with us for decades but it has been refined and its cost has dropped dramatically.

Occulus Rift, Google Cardboard and other VR devices will be hot sellers in the coming year. But Chris Milk didn’t wait. He shot “Clouds over Sidra” at Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFnhMX6oR1Q[/youtube]

This was the first Virtual reality film ever made for the United Nations. Chris explains that unlike film where the viewer is looking through a window frame, this technology takes the viewer through the frame so that they experience what it is like to be in the room with Sidra or sitting next to her in her classroom.

The project was presented to UN dignitaries in Geneva, Switzerland and it did seem to make a difference in their perceptions. Maybe it will for each of us.

Try it yourself by downloading Google Play, VRSE and viewing “Clouds over Sidra” on VRSE, Google Cardboard or other virtual reality devices. If you watch this film on non-VR devices you’ll see it as a distorted 360 degree movie.

The mechanical details of each tragedy are broadcast to the world via live satellite. While survivors are still struggling to breath, observers are consumed with the statistics of disaster.

A category 5 hurricane, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake, the killers were quiet men who kept to themselves. The death toll was 404.

These facts spark our most primitive emotions first because these require the fewest bits of information. We fear that this tragedy might happen to us or we grow angry and seek to punish the real or imagined cause. Our despair grows as these darker motions consume us.

Empathy is a more complex, less primitive and more uniquely human emotion. According to a Princeton and Duke University study entitled, “Brain’s Social Network Implicated in Dehumanizing Others,” by Rick Nauert, MRI scans show that there is a part of the human brain associated with empathy.

But prejudice, racism and socioeconomic status can turn off this empathic part of a person’s brain and enable one associated with disgust. Might this empathy gap explain why people tend to shun war refugees at the same time as they spend millions of dollars per day on wars?

Empathy seems to require more communication bandwidth. Sometimes it requires direct contact with loved-ones in the faraway land or a memories of a time when we ourselves also lived through such a tragedy. Music, photography and visual arts can also trigger empathy. Functional MRI studies have found that literature literally helps us get inside the minds of others by activating the same regions in our brain that tell us the story of who we are.

Whatever the cause for the connection, some people are able to feel deeply for the victims of disaster. Their empathy expands to the scale of the disaster. The may lose sleep, grow physically sick or fall into a depression. Or they might feel compelled to do something, anything to try to fix whatever it is that is broken with the world, with the focus on the needs of the victims rather than the punishment of the cause.

The late film critic Roger Ebert considered empathy to be the most essential quality of a civilization, “We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised.

“We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

Photos from Chris Milk’s “Clouds over Sidra” at VRSE.
Photo of Migrant mother (1936) by Dorthy Lange.
Photo of Syrian refugee woman(2015) by Washington Post

Thanks also to my Lebanese-American cousin Mud for her thoughtful piece on emotional responses to disasters, Laurie Balbo who works with Studio Syria and Collateral Repair; Gael at Dar al Yasmin for giving my family some non-virtual reality experience with Syrian refugees to help us imagine them not as anonymous faraway strangers, but as human beings.

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Architecture for Humanity was a San Francisco-based nonprofit that brought pro-bono architecture and design services to communities in need around the world. Sinclair, a British architect, launched the charity with American writer Kate Stohr in 1999 to help provide shelter for Kosovo refugees returning home after years of regional conflict. It began as a series of open competitions to design temporary housing. By 2013, when both founders left to pursue new careers, the organization had grown to include 90,000 volunteer design professionals, 5 regional offices located around the world and 70 city-based chapters in 14 countries.

“For more than 10 years, we led the movement to bring social design where it is needed most. We built award-winning buildings, ran innovative programs, personally raised more than $5 million in annual funding, year in and year out, and established more than five community design centers that set the standard for rebuilding after disaster”, Cameron wrote in his email. Over 15 years, the organization completed more than 245 projects including schools, sports facilities, and disaster relief.

The NGO had been struggling for about a year, unable to attract funding as the novelty of its approach had waned, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The travesty isn’t that the organization went over budget serving communities around the world,” Margie O’Driscoll, former executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects, told the San Francisco Chronicle’s John King. “It is that humanitarian design isn’t considered a fundamental right. And that today, in San Francisco, it is easier to find funding for an app than to fund an organization which transforms lives in places most Americans don’t know exists.”

An unsettling assertion, which sent me to the NGO’s website to see who was underpinning their operation. It lists 60 “partners and funders” with political clout (Clinton Global Initiative, American Institute of Architects),  deep pockets (Absolut, Google, Bezos Family Foundation), and professional expertise (ARUP, Habitat for Humanity).  With friends like that, was financial support the issue – or was it inadequate management, or a diminished celebrity gloss when Sinclair moved on to greener pastures?

There are other groups with similar missions. Open Architecture Network states on their website, “One billion people live in abject poverty. Four billion live in fragile but growing economies. One in seven people live in slum settlements. By 2020 it will be one in three. We don’t need to choose between architecture or revolution. What we need is an architectural revolution.”

Architecture is the fine art that can materially change the world. I hope architects will continue to design like they give a damn–in whatever form that takes.

Image from Architecture for Humanity

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Our breakaway story about collapsible woven shelters (click here) designed to restore dignity to refugees around the world was so popular, we decided to look around for similar projects.

Cue Exo emergency shelters by Reaction Housing, which has partnered with the Maram Foundation to deliver short-term security to Syrians in need.

That the solar-powered collapsible shelters potentially provide some sense of security and ownership to the person who owns them, or the fact that it could make a great tent for festivals, is perhaps what makes Abeer Seikaly’s design so compelling.

But sometimes in emergency situations, aid workers find themselves faced with hundreds or thousands of people who were very suddenly displaced from their homes – either by natural disaster or a sudden eruption of violence.

In this case, volume takes priority over aesthetics, which is why tents have always been the go-to solution for disaster relief organizations. It is very challenging to transport a large volume of decent, insulated structures that not only provide shelter against the elements, but also protection from opportunistic criminals.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), two million Syrians have fled from their country, while an additional four million have been displaced inside the country’s borders. That’s six million people who are desperately in need of something more humane than a shredded tarp above their heads.

Related: Collapsible woven refugee shelters powered by the sun

Michael McDaniel was initially inspired to build the stackable Exo shelters after watching the appalling conditions people faced following Hurricane Katrina in the United States.

After eight years of finessing his design, which was inspired by the styrofoam cup, McDaniel has launched an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign to put them to good use. The group raised 151% of what they wanted to launch their idea.

And he’s starting in Syria. By teaming up with the Maram Foundation (website unlinked because it wasn’t working, 2019), which is helping Syrian refugees in several ways, McDaniel hopes to help bridge a daunting gap in low-cost, secure housing while also gathering the necessary data to improve his design.

Made with aircraft-grade aluminum and insulated for climate control, each Exo shelter provides temporary housing for up to four people. The bunk style beds look far more comfortable than a cold hard floor, and a digitally-coded door provides security. This is particularly important for women and children.

Easily connected to electricity, the shelters are also well-lit thanks to skylights, which is essential to quality of life. And to make it easer for relief workers to keep track of whether the units are on or offline, each is wired for networking capabilities.

Since they are stackable, the shelters can be transported on a trailer, and when longer term housing is secured for refugees, the units can be reused for the next disaster. Obviously, we wish they wouldn’t be necessary at all, but this is definitely one of the better short term solutions we’ve seen in a while.

Check out Reaction Housing’s Indiegogo campaign and consider supporting them so that a few Syrian families might sleep a bit better at night.

Related: IKEA’s flatpack homes for refugees get a reluctant OK from Lebanon

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How best to provide adequate housing when disaster strikes?  Weather-related calamity can be sudden – think earthquakes and tsunamis. It can be forewarned – as in hurricanes, floods, and droughts. And it can creep up slowly through rising sea levels and civil unrest.

In Urgent Architecture: 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World, author Bridgette Meinhold showcases 40 emergency and long-term housing projects built from conventional materials, but also from sandbags, straw bales, and re-purposed shipping containers.

Some are real, others theoretical, but each is designed to grapple with changeable environments and for fast deployment.

The LifeCube prefab deploys quickly and houses a family of four.

Gabion structures reuse the rubble left by Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Fragments are placed into wire baskets creating blocks to build retaining walls and earthquake-proof structures.

In Pakistan, reinforced straw bale homes are built out of regionally appropriate materials using few tools.

Built on stilts, the Porchdog House can withstand flooding.  Its structure can safely tolerate hurricane-force winds.

Millions of people lack decent housing. There’s critical need for safe, sustainable home designs that are buildable with local materials and hardy enough to withstand severe environmental conditions.  And to be realized, they need to be cheap.

Meinhold’s produced an essential resource for anyone interested in sustainable design, affordable housing, and humanitarian relief.  The book is organized into five categories: rapid shelter, transitional shelters, affordable housing, prefab housing, and adaptable housing. Examples are taken from Malibu and Milan, Bangladesh and Haiti.

The author is an American engineer and Architecture Editor for Inhabitat where she writes about green design, architecture and sustainability.

El Tiemblo is an energy-efficient residence made from four shipping containers.

Urgent Architecture: 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World, by Bridgette Meinhold, published by W.W. Norton, 2013, 256 pages, $50.

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Raising the question “how temporary is temporary?”, they break from existing platforms that warehouse refugee communities without addressing environmental concerns that powerfully affect daily life.

Refutrees cooks up environmentally responsive projects in displaced communities that also create sustainable employment. Similar to artist Jean Bradbury’s approach with the Safi artisans, there’s a catalytic assist at the start, but project control and management ultimately pass to the locals.

Refutrees creates projects that are sustainable, entrepreneurial, and responsive to the direct needs of local communities. Select projects also address persistent issues of land and water degradation.

Founder and CEO Lamya Hussain had engaged with refugee communities early in her academic career. Her extensive field research exposed a dearth of projects in camp settings that served more than one purpose. Why not dream up multifaceted schemes? Ventures that intersect health, environment, art and energy? And, while you’re at it, create jobs.

Many indigenous communities hold a relationship with their land that is as spiritual as it is socioeconomic, a reality at odds with ad hoc camp infrastructure which typically lacks”town planning” or access to personal greenspace. There’s a scarcity of communal open space, gardens, parks or playgrounds. Speaking with United Nations Relief and Works Agency affiliates, Hussain discovered there is frequently no clear strategy to tackle these issues that have critical impact on camp residents.

So Refutrees is kicking off a pilot to build rooftop gardens to allow communities to grow their own organic produce – which creates new greenspace – and improves environmental aesthetics. This project will efficiently utilize limited space within the camps.  It creates an opportunity for urban agriculture that encourages entrepreneurship while promoting healthy diets.

Sound like an initiative you could support? They’re currently raising funds for the rooftop gardens – check out their website for details. They’re seeking experts who can advise on scheme improvements such as identifying a wider variety of vegetables to grow, and how best to tackle issues of local water restrictions.

Refutrees is also working on an eco-art project to address the lack of safe spaces for camp children. The Aida refugee camp (outside Bethlehem in the West Bank) is fundraising to build a children’s recreational space, and Refutrees seeks artists to design a scheme for up-cycling local waste into a functional and green playground.

You can read more about Refutrees here. Match their multipurpose mandate by supporting them, and you ‘ll scratch two itches (social responsibility and increased environmentalism) with one action.

Image from Refutrees Facebook page

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Groundbreaking “Concrete Cloth” allows ancient building material to be used in a totally new way.

Concrete Cloth is a pioneering “building-in-a-bag” that requires only water and air for construction: it was named material of the year in the 2011 Material ConneXions MEDIUM Awards.

Concrete is one of the world’s most popular building materials.

It follows a simple, ancient recipe: build a mold to form a desired shape; drop in some reinforcing (steel bars as example); mix cement, water, and rock aggregates; pour the mix in the mold and let it set up. It’s a great idea for housing refugees in Syria.

This new cement-impregnated flexible fabric technology let’s you skip expensive forms, structural reinforcement and time-sensitive mixing routines.  We’re talking inflatable concrete buildings. It’s concrete in a roll, just add water.

Developed by Milliken & Company (USA) and Concrete Canvas Ltd. (UK), the product traps a dry concrete powder between two surfaces that are linked together by a 3-dimensional fiber matrix. One surface is completely waterproof.  The other is porous and contains hydrophilic fibers, which work with the powder to draw water into the cloth, aiding concrete hydration. Once set, the material forms a three-layer composite with the long linked fibers being held in place by a matrix of high-strength concrete.

The fibers fix the powder in place, it can’t move even when the cloth is bent. They also reinforce the structure, prevent cracking, absorb impacts, and provide a safe “plastic” failure mode (the fibers progressively take up load if the concrete fails).

The fabric can’t be over-hydrated, so the cement-ratio no longer matters.  Concrete Cloth is durable, with a wear-rate about double that of conventional concrete. It uses up to 95% less concrete than traditional applications. That’s a tiny carbon footprint.

Entire semi-permanent “tent cities” are rapidly deployable as they require only water and air for set-up.  Finished shelters are water proof and fire proof.  They come in two sizes, 25 m2 and 54m2, and ship easily, making them perfect solutions for disaster relief or emergency operations. A 25 m2 unit can be installed by 2 people without any special training in under an hour.  Shelters are ready for occupancy in 24 hours.

The units have excellent thermal properties, and are structurally capable of being covered with sand or earth for added insulation. They can be fitted with a combined forced air / inflation units, and their hard shell and lockable doors provide a level of security not possible with soft skinned structures, protecting people and possessions within.

While not as attractive as LoftCubes nor as inventive as the 4-foot wide “parasitic house“, these instant-concrete buildings-in-a-bag provide all the benefits of a permanent structure without the associated cost and time delays. Born to serve a military application, let’s see them pressed into civil service soon.

Images via Concrete Canvas Ltd.

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Reminiscent of the work of fellow Iranian Nader Khalili, who perfected economical earth bag construction, this minimalist dome shelter is made of bamboo, crowned with rice plants and features comfortable bamboo mats that are ideal for guests who stop in for a cup of tea. Not only is this project attractive and sustainable, but its gentle resistance to wind and earthquakes makes it an excellent shelter during emergencies as well.

 Bamboo is one of the most renewable building materials on earth and also one of the most flexible. Only 70 bamboo canes were used to create the frame of this dome, which was inspired by a project that one of Parsa’s students was attempting. First it is necessary to cut the bamboo and then to let it dry for two days so that it will be flexible and soft.

With only three non-professionals working on the project, the dome was constructed in one day near the forest of Katalom. The base is comprised of locally-sourced gas pipes that give the shelter optimum mobility. Finally the whole structure is topped with dry rice plants that expand when wet and therefore prevent rain from permeating the interior while simultaneously allowing plenty of natural ventilation.

This is an organic structure made of and close to the earth; its rapid construction makes it a wonderful solution to emergency housing in a country that is particularly prone to earthquakes. Plus, it’s beautiful, and doesn’t cost a pile of money to realize.

Parsa is an award-winning designer with partners all over the world; although his studio is relatively young, he regularly works with such luminaries as Shigeru Ban Architects and NJP Architects.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0luUlcINY9g&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

Take a look at his YouTube clip above (narrated in Farsi with English subtitles) for a closer look at how easy it is to build a dome home out of bamboo and other natural materials.

:: Inhabitat

More on Iranian Design:
Nader Khalili Built Earth Buildings Fit for Space
Curvy Desert Home Designed by Iranians Mimics the Snail
Israel, Iran Take Top Endangered Species Design Prize

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