Long-term encampment is a growing aspect of a growing refugee crisis. There is hence the need to ensure shelters provide a safe and suitable environment. We present the first field study including social and thermal comfort surveys and physical measurements conducted in Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, during summer and winter. This required the creation of a new Arabic thermal comfort survey based on the numerical ASHRAE scales to ensure the elimination of any ambiguities due to translating the scales. The three analysis methods used (linear, logistic and multiple logistic regression) all gave the same neutral temperature, 23 °C; however, Fanger's predicted mean vote model was found to underestimate the adaptive potential of the refugees. The comfort band found using logistic regression ranged from 28.4 °C to 17.2 °C, suggesting a significant adaptability of the refugees, but not one equal to the temperature range found on site. Issues with the clash between ventilation, privacy, security and sand ingress were identified, and this points to a need to re-evaluate shelter ventilation in general. However, given the extreme conditions recorded, natural cross ventilation alone will not be sufficient in achieving summer comfort. Combining this with the observation that, due to safety and lack of resource, the refugees have no means of heating at night, a shelter solution that successfully includes insulation, and possibly thermal mass would seem important

The population of people living in temporary settlements after disasters is in the millions and the average stay in these settlements exceeds a decade. This paper reviews the literature on the design of post-disaster relief shelters in order to: establish the state of the art, identify trends and describe the academic activity of the past forty years. The analysis demonstrates that the academic engagement in this topic is limited, with fewer than sixty publications in the past four decades. Displacement camps are often situated in countries with extreme climates; however the issue of the thermal performance of shelters and their impact on health is found to be further overlooked. In an attempt to rebalance this situation, thermal surveys were conducted in two refugee camps in Jordan. The study found that the refugees were very unsatisfied with the thermal conditions in their shelters, particularly in summer. Internal surface temperatures of 46°C were recorded in September and indoor CO₂ concentration levels of 2700 ppm were measured in winter. In addition, the study reported on the adaptation strategies used by refugees to cope with the heat and cold, and on their views on shelter design considerations and satisfaction.

The lifespan of displacement camps around the globe is often measured in years or decades. Nevertheless, the establishment of camps to house people fleeing political violence is often framed as an emergency measure of limited duration. These are depicted as “temporary” spaces in which people are provided with aid and support until such time that they are able to return to their “permanent” homes. In this article, we focus on the actions and aspirations of camp residents to imbue their dwellings with a sense of home. Our empirical material was generated through fieldwork in two camps in Jordan housing people displaced from Syria. “Homemaking” in this location calls into question the rigid opposition between “temporary” and “permanent”: an opposition that, for diverse reasons, host states, donors, humanitarians, and camp residents may strive to maintain, at least in rhetorical terms. Attending to the creation of dedicated space for receiving guests, we consider the content of homemaking as shaped by residen...

Shelters for the displaced can suffer from socio-cultural incompatibility and significant levels of occupant dissatisfaction. Participatory design (PD) is known to help reduce such issues. This is the first study to investigate the effectiveness of different PD methods at engaging and capturing users’ needs for shelter design in refugee camps. It also aimed to identify which visualization tools are best at: engaging participants; communicating designs (e.g. concept, size and materials); and facilitating proposing modifications. This is a particularly large study with 16 workshops and 161 participants. Two PD methods were deployed: (i) design-your-own (where refugees proposed their ideal shelter); (ii) adapt-a-design (where refugees evaluated and modified pre-existing shelter designs). The shelters in (ii) were presented using three visualization tools: computer models, physical prototypes and virtual reality. Design-your-own proved less engaging and led participants to produce designs similar to their existing shelters. Adapt-a-design stimulated more dialogue and was more informative. Physical prototypes facilitated engagement in shelter modifications, computer models proved least able to communicate concepts, while virtual reality was best at communicating scale and size.

There are more than six million refugees living in camps globally, primarily in places with severe climates. While camps are planned to be temporary, they can be in use for decades. This ‘planned temporariness’, despite their potential longevity, together with the pressures of rapidly emerging situations, means the construction and monitoring of demonstrators is not a primary concern for their developers. This lack of iterative design improvement results in shelters with thermal environments far from ideal and a risk of increased morbidity. Here we propose a cyclical process for improving such shelters involving the thermal monitoring of pre-existing shelters to construct validated baseline simulation models of similar shelters in other areas of emerging crisis. These models can then be evolved and improved within an optimization cycle before mass-construction and field testing. Here we demonstrate the method for the case of Azraq camp in Jordan. Starting from an analysis of field survey data which exposes a high incidence of heat-stress experienced in the shelters, a series of architectural strategies are applied to the design, resulting in significant reductions in overheating. This work suggests that the proposed cyclical approach can lead to significant improvement in conditions currently experienced in refugee camp shelters.