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Clearing up the mess: New thinking for managing disaster
June 2006
Jubilant staff from oil company Shell celebrate their return to work in the still much-damaged city of New Orleans. Around the world population centres have been taking a battering from natural disasters. Events like Hurricane Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, and Queensland's Cyclone Larry have left a swathe of death, injuries and destruction. In the printed edition of TransScan - downloadable from this site - we have published a three-page feature on world wide trends in disaster management.
Demand for 'instant' shelter brings new solutions
Natural disasters caused by such events at the Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina are prompting architects and designers to take a second look at how best to provide emergency accommodation.
One idea seeks to improve on the ubiquitous refugee tent, while another visualises the transport of entire "cities" of instant houses anywhere in the world on board containerships.
Lew Oliver, one of the leading architects behind America's New Urbanist movement, has even come up with a new prefabricated house design for New Orleans which he thinks could be used for low-cost house wherever it is needed.
Here we take a look at all three ideas currently being promoted to governments around the world.
Lew Oliver is calling his house (See: Illustration A) the Creole Revival cottage. It is prefabricated, "easily transportable" and price below the $US60,000 the US Government is paying for the caravans it is still shipping into New Orleans to house the city's homeless.
Mr Oliver says the cottage with its "indigenous style and form" is open-planned with a living room, eat-in kitchen, two-bedrooms and a bathroom.
The containerised house (See: Illustration B) is the brainchild of California-based, Aquentium Inc and is designed specifically to be folded up and stored when no longer need. Although it fits the standard 40-foot module of an international shipping container, when folded out it offers occupants a living room, two-bedrooms, a bathroom with shower and a kitchen pre-fitted with appliances.
The dome-shaped "Concrete Canvas" (See: Illustration C) is designed by two post-graduate students from London's Royal College of Art. It is really meant as a replacement for the ubiquitous refugee tent. The designers, Peter Brewin and William Crawford, say traditional tents are certainly not the best place to house disaster victims - especially if they have to live in them for months, or even years.
So what the two have come up with is a new form of structure that can be airdrop to the scene in a small reinforced bag, and then unfolded, foot-pumped into shape, and fully "built" in under 40 minutes. The dome is made from cement-impregnated canvass that once sprayed with water, will bond into a solid structure.
