Daniel Kerber wants to improve the living conditions of refugee camps. In general refugee camps are designed and built to be temporary bases but often end up being long term habitats with long term problems.
In Kerber’s SolveforX talk, Re-engineering refugee camps and slums, he throws out some staggering statistics about Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp. 100,000 people live in the camp that has the landmass of 1,000 football fields. $500,000 is needed to maintain basic services – 3.5 million liters of water are trucked in every day. Summer temperatures rise to 110 degrees and it snows in the winter.
Planning a refugee camp is a huge undertaking – shelter, access to water and food, and access to basic utilities. Weeks or months would be an uncomfortable time to be at a refugee camp before finding a new home, but Daniel gives a statistic that the average lifespan of a refugee camp is over twenty years.
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/daniel-kerber-re-engineering-refugee-camps-and-slums
The X in Kerber’s talk is “to turn slums and refugee camps into a place that people can call home” – if the reality is that these temporary ideas exist for a third of a refugee’s life then that time should be positive, comfortable and productive.
People in refugee camps are already working to improve their living conditions. Shelters are expanded or modified to meet the need of individual families. Businesses are built and markets have a monthly turnover of $30 million. Demand for transport of people and goods is very high. A model of urban life begins to form in any refugee camp as existence shifts from basic survival to lifestyle improvement.
Kerber’s idea is to take these people that are seen as passive victims and treat them as active inventors. In December 2013 an innovation workshop was held in the camp – urban planners, local authorities, humanitarian organizations and inventors discussed the problems and solutions of the camp.
Black water and sewage were redirected or used as fertilizer for urban farming. Shipping containers and movable shelters were upgraded with mobility methods and then outfitted with gps trackers to learn about the social dynamics of the camp and understand how the people move.
Biomedical based identification systems were put in place to track the inhabitants of the camp, and allowed Kerber to create benchmarks for each person. Now the possibility existed to track each person and make sure that their quality of life (health, education, economic status) could be improved.
Future plans are to create a fabrication lab so that refugees can create and invent their own life improvements, and a fully sustainable energy system that uses solar and wind energy. Wireless internet connections will be used to establish a fast easy mobile payment system.
Toward the end of his talk Daniel shows a slide of the project’s sponsors. Large companies like BMW, colleges including Harvard and MIT, the Dutch and Canadian governments, and the City of Melbourne are all providing aid to the project. The team is working to leverage the people, land and idea resources of the camp to thrive with the rest of the world.
Zaatari is a social engineering project that is an amazing model for the rest of the world. The small improvements like farms and markets are easy to point out to investors and stakeholders but the large ideas about using engineering to improve the human existence are even more important.
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/daniel-kerber-re-engineering-refugee-camps-and-slums