(A4) Architecture & design for PAUC
Housing homeless populations is a critical component of an emergency situation following a
calamity; swift transitional housing capabilities will contribute to the resilience of the State once it will face a devastating earthquake, and to its amelioration and recovery potential. The national reference scenario defined by the authorities depicts a situation where, beside thousands of casualties and widespread damage to infrastructures, hundreds of thousands may be displaced, owning unusable or even ruined houses. This situation requires a wide range of solutions for numerous temporary dwellings, for an extended period - five years, and longer for hard-core situations (Ministry of Housing, 2010).
The State of Israel has experienced extensive provisional housing of the homeless with massive
immigration waves, since the establishment of the “Ma’abarot” camps during the 1950s’, up to the ex-Soviet Union exodus during the 1990’s. The Ma’abarot serves as a test case of fast and extensive emergency housing, an opportunity to learn how to better design temporary residential solutions. Our architecture and design team will examine and analyze the successes and the lack thereof in the establishment of Ma’abarot and subsequent temporary neighborhoods, in comparison with refugee camps established during emergencies in Jordan and Italy. We will review different current approaches in the world and the tools available for planners to efficiently populate a large population in high quality fashion. Such tools will minimize havoc and will enable fast response to various scenarios, assisting efficient and high-standard reconstruction of damaged infrastructures and rehabilitation of the populace.
The Ma’abarot were established by the Jewish Agency in collaboration with the Government of Israel. They were erected overnight from light materials: initially tents, then the yurt-like “badon”s, tin sheds, and mini-shacks, measuring 10-15 square metres. The reasoning for selecting this form of temporal residence stemmed from lack of funding, as well as from the possibility to swiftly erect thousands of units free of prior investment in planning and preparation (Kachansky, 1986).
During extreme situations such as the aftermath of an earthquake, flood, tsunami, as well as wide spread hostilities, a situation might arise in which the State needs fast and available plans to efficiently and cost-effectively relocate displaced communities for an undetermined period following the stipulation of the Ministry of Housing that were approved 2010. The establishment of the Ma’abarot was a swift and, in some ways, efficient operation, yet its cost was high for a low standard of living. The concept of designing the temporal dwellings and the Ma’abarot as a whole was an ad-hoc solution that did not match the potential embodied had it been planned in advance. For future high-standard solutions of similar scenarios we need to approach the design from an inter-disciplinary perspective and prepare guidelines for the construction of temporary dwellings that will address specific situations depending on the time of need and the space available