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Professor Tom Scott-Smith has written a new article for Limn (a scholarly magazine devoted to outlining contemporary problems) titled ‘A Slightly Better Shelter?’.

In January 2017, the IKEA refugee shelter (or more accurately, the Better Shelter) was declared the worldwide Design of the Year. As Scott-Smith writes, “Far from being a better tent, this shelter has some revolutionary ambitions. But is it a better tent? Does it live up to its aims of producing a compact, cheap, lightweight product for meeting a basic human need?”

The shelter is certainly not without its critics – falling into “those who argued the shelter did too little”, usually architects, and those who argued “that it did too much”, usually humanitarians. Scott-Smith examines these arguments and the tensions surrounding its design.

Read the article here >>

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