A castles of sand: 60 sandbag classrooms, Mbera Refugee Camp_Mauritania
A technology transfer attempt that introduces labor intensive technologies in a semi-permanent intervention
In Mauritania FAREstudio is currently operating at the Mbera Refugee Camp as ‘construction expert’ for Italian NGO INTERSOS, an implementing partner of a UN agency within the framework of a primary education program aimed at improving teaching-and-learning provisions in the camp and nearby communities.
The brief is to provide 60 classrooms, ‘transitional’ yet better, in terms of comfort and durability, than the tents usually provided to front an emergency.
The challenge in building 60 classrooms in Mbera refugee camp was to provide an alternative to transitional structures usual in arid contexts, by combining materials and techniques.
Instead of common solutions such as concrete slab, metal frame, corrugated iron sheets and plastic enclosures, FAREstudio combined sandbag masonry for massive walls and plastic sheets on metal trusses as lightweight roof, with a bricolage approach inherently loose and apt to combine what is locally available.
Innovation is a relative concept and in this case it lays in the inventive use of available resources that questions usual refugee camps policies and challenges the orthodox application of
formalized standards.
FAREstudio proposal is an attempt of technology transfer:
sandbag masonry is widely used in various locations around the world, the plastic roof derives from truck industry, metalwork is
based on local examples. Used materials are reasonably affordable, skills required to produce the building are rapidly achievable and construction technologies are easily repeatable.
The weak, or absent, sense of belonging of refugees is a major issue in re-creating some forms of social fabric in the camps they
inhabit.
Hiring refugees as untrained labor for the schools construction triggers their own professional skills and entails an opportunity for them to earn some money but, above all, it makes them
actively contribute to the empowerment of the new community they forcedly belong to, and hopefully it will enforce their concern for the environment they live in.
Refugee camps are, by definition, environmental hazards and resource consumers. In such a context, substantially reduce the amount of embedded energy, water demand and transported
materials is in itself a way to increase efficiency. Moreover, a sandbag construction can be dismantled almost completely, thus
minimizing the environmental impact in terms of waste production as well.
The market of cooperation is not so fair and transparent as it should and as it is described: every action that widens the platform of potential beneficiaries and subjects involved has an
impact on communities that are deprived. A main defy has been to transform a capital/transport intensive work (construction materials coming from the capital city) into a labor intensive one:
the aim was not to save money but to spend it properly, channeling benefits from a single General Contractor to as many community members as possible, through a cash-for-work system based on locally available resources.
A refugee camp is not a place for aesthetic. This assumption stems from the logic of emergency but it should not neglect the idea that refugees need and deserve a built environment in line with their cultural identity. Tradition is not intended here as vernacular condescendence but, if properly re-interpreted and adapted, it is recognized as the fundamental base for appropriation and appropriateness.
