News from the Collective

Across rural India the hand-crafted, biofuel cookstove, or chulha, has remained a ubiquitous feature of domestic life. Chulhas are generally cheap or free to construct and repair, are typically hand built from materials like stone and clay found in the local environment, and they use locally available fuels—solid, “mundane bioenergy” (Chatti et al. 2017) such as wood and crop residue—to heat water and cook food. They are an egalitarian technology. With a biofuel stove people need not depend on cash, fuel distribution networks, or hard-to-repair technologies to cook a daily meal. Meanwhile, both the activity of cooking on the chulha and the hearth itself are imbued with social and cultural significance. Fuel procurement and cooking may be experienced as drudgery but equally as sites of (primarily women’s) autonomy and skill. The stove is a potent symbol of warmth, nourishment, and care; it imparts a delicious flavor to flatbreads (roti) and offers an important source of heat. Yet, for more than half a century, humanitarian-minded people and organizations have been preoccupied with the use of “biofuel cookstoves.”

Biofuel as Problem

Biofuel stoves are targeted as wasteful, dirty, and dangerous. Experts agree that cooking with biofuel is an activity that requires development intervention and modernization, even though users themselves may prioritize other needs. One clear point of consensus is that cooking with biofuels indoors, over open flames, is very harmful to respiratory and pulmonary health (Smith 2000). At the household level, burning biofuel indoors is linked to emissions of smoke and particulate matter that harm the lungs, heart, and eyes. At the ecosystem level, fuelwood collection is linked to deforestation and the degradation of forest resources, as well as increases in the vulnerability of women to injury and sexual violence. At the planetary level, burning biofuel is linked to atmospheric carbon and global warming.

Despite an intense and longstanding focus on rural cooking practices, there is no consensus regarding appropriate solutions. Some argue that from a health perspective, the only viable and just solution to the problem of biomass cookstoves is a massive investment in new infrastructure capable of bringing clean energy to rural people who have little expendable income (Smith 2002). In this view, all people should have access to clean cooking rather than to incrementally improved stoves that may reduce smoke but compare poorly with existing chulhas in functionality and durability.

Others argue for continued efforts to improve biofuel stoves. One reason is pragmatic: it is unlikely that the poorest people in the world will obtain access to alternatives any time soon, so biofuel gathered from the environment will continue to be the primary cooking fuel used by many for some time (Jagger 2017; Jagger and Jumbe 2016). A second reason to continue improving biofuel cooking technologies is that from a climate perspective, replacing renewable and locally sourced biofuel with fossil fuels—whether gas or electricity from coal-fired power plants—is hardly a desirable goal (Kikkeri 2017). If we factor in—rather than bracket out—the energy used for fossil fuel extraction and efficiency losses at every transfer point as it moves from source to household consumer, it becomes less clear that the use of locally available biofuel is a big problem. Rather than shifting to fossil fuel energy, it may be better, some say, to focus on reducing the stove emissions harmful to health and climate.

To this end, many actors with varied goals have tried to change the way rural people cook in developing countries by engineering, manufacturing, and distributing improved stoves. All such stoves aim to improve the lives of the energy deprived, and their intended beneficiaries are those people whose search for gathered—not purchased—fuel is a part of daily life (Yadama 2013) and who lack access to the cooking technologies preferred by wealthier families the world over, namely electricity and liquefied petroleum gas.

The Enduring Project of Improving Stoves in Rural India

In some regions of the world, improved biofuel stoves have diffused successfully. In rural India, however, massive efforts to replace the chulha with improved, clean, and efficient cooking technologies have not led to their widespread adoption (Chandrashekhar 2015; Khandelwal et al. 2017; Subramanian 2015). Among the countless improved stoves that have been introduced here we single out two distinct branches of design: the “smokeless chulhas” and the “high-efficiency cookstoves.”

The smokeless chulhas reduce smoke inhalation by redirecting smoke out of a house through a chimney. In the early 1980s the Indian government funded training programs to construct and use one such smokeless chulha, the “Nada Stove,” designed by Madhu Sarin and her Haryana village partners. The training programs, though ambitious in number, lacked sufficient resources and resulted in chulhas that were too tall, pot openings that were too small, and chimneys that didn’t provide adequate draft to make the stove function properly. In addition, the introduction of chimneys in communities with thatched roofs introduced dangerous new fire risks (Chandrashekhar 2015). Reflecting on the process, Sarin (1986) described how village women were already improving their stoves, but when the government got involved, the massive scaling up and standardization of these improvements led to failure. In personal communication with us she further observed that the diversity of chulhas found throughout India is testament to the ways that poor rural users have long been modifying stoves, even if outside experts do not recognize such efforts as technological innovations. Non-literate village women are, and always have been, technological innovators.

Fig. 1. This high-efficiency cookstove manufactured by Envirofit increases cooking efficiency but requires smaller diameter fuelwood, causes certain foods to cook unevenly or burn, and exposes children and cooks to burn risks. Spider webs and dust seen in the side view indicate this family has decided not to continue using this stove.

By contrast, “high-efficiency cookstoves” such as the Envirofit stove (Figure 1) reduce emissions and wood usage by restricting the addition of wood to the fire, limiting heat loss, concentrating flames, and improving airflow (Dalberg Global Development Advisors 2013; Sinha 2002). These improved cookstoves often introduce other kinds of problems. Reductions in the size of the fuel opening to minimize heat loss, for example, require chopping large pieces of wood into smaller pieces, a time-consuming and laborious task. Adjustments intended to concentrate flames decrease the flexibility of the stove to accommodate cooking utensils for different meals. Stoves made of solid metal expose cooks and children to burn risks. Some models are so complex that villagers cannot fix them without specialized tools, resources, and knowledge. Most are too expensive for villagers to buy; for households living on a dollar a day, a high-efficiency cookstove can cost up to a month’s income.

Where these new technologies have entered homes, generally due to the efforts of governments and nonprofit organizations, there is little evidence of long-term use. These efforts have raised questions about how best to measure “adoption.” For example, research on long-term use in real-world settings suggests that the potential benefits of improved cookstoves based on testing in lab conditions “go up in smoke” when these new technologies fall into disrepair and disuse (Hanna 2016).

Puzzled by the persistence of efforts to replace the chulha in the face of repeated failure, we (Khandelwal et al. 2017) decided to step back and take a big-picture approach to understand this intense focus on stoves over and above other problems faced by the rural poor. What we found is that a variety of actors have centered on a set of intertwined goals: improving health, solving a fuelwood crisis, stemming deforestation, empowering women, and addressing climate change. As new concerns have arisen over the last hundred years, these have not displaced previous goals but rather accumulated over time.

The chulha is a condensed symbol with many different meanings. Cooking interacts with other aspects of rural life: technology, housing design, women’s labor, availability of biofuel, seasonality and region, livestock grazing, labor migration, and cash income. Thus, it is inherently difficult not only to standardize improved stoves that will work in different contexts, but also to measure their impacts over time and across locations. Lab-based and top-down efforts to improve stoves have been frustrated by such complexities.

The Big and Small of Improved Stoves

In January 2017 we (Khandelwal and colleagues) visited the Biomass Cookstove Test Centre at Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture and Technology in Udaipur, Rajasthan. This is one of four such centers funded by India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy that certifies manufactured stoves for both business ventures and nonprofits. During our visit we watched an engineering student who had just passed her doctoral defense demonstrate the stove she had designed for use in rural India. In the next room a “no photography allowed” sign hung above neatly arranged rows of improved stoves, an indication of the proprietary interests attached to these models.

These improved stoves are all designed to be household technologies. They are small in size, portable, relatively simple, typically lightweight, and modestly priced. In India they are the flipside of the large-scale, capital-intensive projects such as mega-dams and power plants built to provide energy services to urban populations but provoked critique and resistance for ignoring environmental concerns and the rights of those they displace (Baviskar 1995; Birkenholtz 2016). They are humanitarian goods in that they are inexpensive, scalable devices designed to alleviate suffering and save lives; they are also little development devices in that they envision social transformation by modernizing rural kitchens to improve human health, standard of living, and forest resources.

Stoves can be both gifts and goods. As with solar lights and other technologies made for socially distant others, improved cookstoves slide easily between the categories of humanitarian gifts subsidized or given for free, and the humanitarian goods designed, patented, and sold by national and multinational corporations in the name of social entrepreneurship (Cross 2013).

Although some experts push for a market approach to improved stoves, many of the stoves manufactured by private companies are sold to humanitarian and development organizations that then offer them as gifts. Yet regardless of whether they are sold or given away, the improved stoves designed by experts who are socially removed from users continue to face the same obstacles to adoption and replicate the same lack of follow-through. Improved stoves are typically promoted by outsiders in a top-down mode rather than produced in response to demand on the ground. They are often promoted by powerful agents to save lives or to improve the welfare of people who lack access to modern energy infrastructure, such as those residing in rural areas or in hastily constructed refugee camps. Humanitarian and development efforts are plagued by lack of long-term investment because donors prioritize short-term projects, resulting in a chronic lack of attention to the repair and replacement of improved stoves.

There are many reasons that well-intentioned efforts to diffuse improved stoves have not succeeded in India, even when they can demonstrate (in a lab setting) reductions in fuelwood use and/or harmful emissions. These reasons have been well documented in myriad case studies. They include cultural dissonance, a mismatch between the goals of stove promoters and those of rural people, the poor performance of stoves that do not live up to big claims, the burden of buying new cooking vessels or chopping wood into smaller pieces, underestimation of the benefits of traditional chulhas that are easily built and repaired, and a poor implementation process (Khandelwal et al. 2017).

The Small and Nonintrusive Mewar Angithi

Given the problems encountered with smokeless chulhas and high-efficiency stoves, the staying power of the chulha is not surprising: it is naturally insulated to avoid burning a curious hand and to reduce heat loss to the surroundings, it is built to accommodate common cooking surfaces (tavas and pots) and meals perfectly, and it doesn’t require excessive chopping of wood.

There is one inefficiency of the traditional stove, however: limited airflow. Placement of wood on the dirt floor of the stove limits the air available for combustion. During meal preparation, ash accumulates and smothers firewood and embers that break off from the wood. The energy in unburned embers is not effectively used for cooking, so more firewood is needed per meal; these embers also emit more smoke and harmful air pollutants as they smolder in the stove.

Is it possible to improve the three-stone hearth while preserving those aspects embedded in the cultural economy of the rural kitchen? This is the question that motivated a team of engineers and social scientists in a University of Iowa research group who, although fully cognizant of the problems plaguing improved stove programs, did not dismiss outright the potential for technological innovations introduced from the outside to improve people’s lives.

Based on the principle that efficient combustion produces less smoke, they designed the Mewar Angithi (Figure 2), a simple steel grate inserted into existing chulhas (Udaykumar et al. 2015). Named after the region of Mewar where it originated, the insert improves airflow by creating a channel between the stove floor and firewood. This separates ash buildup that can smother unburned wood and catches larger embers, allowing them to combust more completely.

The engineers showed that without introducing any new obstacles, this simple addition to existing stoves compares in wood savings and particulate emissions reductions with the most efficient natural draft high-efficiency cookstoves on the market. Most important, the Mewar Angithi is affordable for most villagers at a cost of only a dollar, flexible in that it can be used with existing cooking technology, and durable because it lacks moving parts and delicate materials.

Fig. 2. The Mewar Angithi, a simple metal grate insert, is designed to improve airflow to flames to improve combustion efficiency and reduce wood usage, cooking times, and particulate emissions. Source: Rebecca Kauten (top).

In tests conducted at the Biomass Cookstove Test Centre in Udaipur, the insert reduced wood usage by 63% and soot production by an impressive 89%. Seeing these results, all researchers involved were eager to deliver the device to villages and conduct more field tests. Could these results be produced in real kitchens? Could this reduce the time women spend collecting wood or smoke-related illness?

In 2015, Kayley Lain and Sailesh Rao arranged the distribution of 1,000 Mewar Angithi units in five Rajasthani villages to test the performance of the device in the field. A local steel fabricator produced the units and a nongovernmental organization (NGO) partner, the Foundation for Ecological Security, managed the distribution process. Testing these units in homes revealed an average of 33% reduction in wood usage in seven households. Particulate matter reductions as high as 51% were observed in one household with an average reduction of 33%, although these measurements involve many more variables than wood consumption and will require considerably more data to reduce uncertainty in these figures.

The engineering team conducted additional hybrid lab/field tests at the University of Iowa by building and testing a chulha using utensils brought from Rajasthan in an enclosed structure meant to replicate household conditions in a village; this method produced more data than observing daily cooking in village homes, but was more realistic than testing in ideal lab conditions. These tests showed a 31% reduction in large (~10 μm) particulate matter, which is in line with field data.

Lain and Rao surveyed village users six months after distribution and heard responses such as, “When I use the Mewar Angithi, smoke doesn’t make my eyes water while I’m cooking.” Many reported shorter cooking time (presumably due to hotter, more efficient fires) and reduced wood use. In a sample of 80 households in Rajasthan who received these inserts, 71% reported using it daily, and none of the devices were damaged in any way (this was a serious problem with more complex improved stove designs). Some women reported that they do not collect wood as many times a week as they did before they received a Mewar Angithi. Those who chose not to use their inserts cited insufficient information upon receipt of the device or small chulha openings that could not accommodate the insert they received. Users reported the small device introduced no inconveniences and required no changes in their cooking practices. Compare this with the many obstacles imposed by improved stoves such as the Envirofit high-efficiency stove (described above).

Modest Devices as Model

The Mewar Angithi is a modest or humble cookstove device in several senses. First, much like the Zimbabwe Bush Pump described by de Laet and Mol (2000), it is small in ego and heroism. Inspired by common knowledge about elevating firewood to promote better airflow, this simple design claims neither patent nor ownership, nor is it imposed with admonitions of “dirty” cooking or grandiose claims about modernity.

Second, it is a technically simple device based on sound combustion principles; users should be able to easily observe how it works to improve airflow by allowing ash to fall through the holes of the insert and then, if necessary, modifying it by bending it to fit a smaller chulha.

Third, the process of implementation is also minimally disruptive to current cooking practices. Unlike the Bush Pump, this insert requires very little training and its adoption is at the level of household rather than village; this suits the Bhil households in southern Rajasthan because they are dispersed across the landscape and cooking occurs at the household level. Users can also easily remove the insert if desired because installation only requires placing it in an existing stove (right-side up).

Fourth, it has the potential to be a “fluid” technology with vague and shifting boundaries (de Laet and Mol 2000). It is easily adapted (to fit a small stove) and reproduced with minimal capital and technical knowledge, which makes it unsuitable for humanitarian entrepreneurship and market logics (Redfield 2016). It is also very much like the grates integral to many improved wood-burning stoves, so it simply takes one feature of many improved stoves that can be inserted into any chulha to “improve” it. In principle, it can be made with clay rather than steel.

The design is simple and flexible enough to be manufactured and diffused in localities around the world, which can also provide economic opportunities in small communities. Fabio Parigi and Michele Del Viscio have already sparked insert manufacturing at a school in Nyumbani, Kenya, where students were able to make their own stove inserts with tools available to them in the village (Parigi et al. 2016). Ongoing efforts to collect data about cooking practices and impacts should improve our understanding of the insert’s ability to reduce harmful emissions and wood consumption. However, its fluid characteristics also make it difficult to measure impacts on health, environment, and social relations.

The Indian chulhas that remain ubiquitous throughout rural India, despite humanitarian efforts to render them obsolete, are custom made for each home and vary depending on climate, regional food, size of utensils, and other factors. One reason for the failure of previous improved stove programs is that standardization and scaling up introduce their own problems. Small, technically modest devices such as the insert are more likely to support a foundation of indigenous and local participation in the process of generating and applying new technical knowledge.

the Mewar Angithi at work. Photo by Donna Cleveland.

A small, steel fireplace grate that can be inserted into most existing stoves or adapted to fit is more likely to diffuse via influence; this means technical adjustment to fit user needs can be an organic part of the diffusion process. Though we have called it the Mewar Angithi, this device, which carries no patent or trademark, can also simply be called a “stove insert” or “stove grate.” This little device, modest as it is, makes a bold claim about how people might design and diffuse humanitarian goods in ways that have the potential to democratize “expertise” and undermine the market logic that has shaped both humanitarian and development efforts to modernize cooking practices in rural India.

The Humble Future

Despite renewed efforts to transform the cooking practices of people in rural India, we suggest that humble cookstove interventions will remain important.

In 2016, India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas rolled out the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana program, which offered free connections and subsidies for gas cylinders to families living “below the poverty line.” Though this scheme is ambitious and will no doubt move many households away from biofuel, the shift will be neither easy nor total. Women in remote parts of rural India, for example, must rely on men’s help to take gas cylinders to towns on public transport or motorcycles for exchange, but their men may not consider it worth their time to get the refill. By contrast, women do not need to rely on men to collect fuelwood.

If India’s past holds any lessons, those who have gained the least from large-scale infrastructure projects related to energy due to their geographical, political, and/or economic marginalization are also least likely to benefit from the government effort to make clean cooking fuel (“clean” at the point of cooking) available to all. Many Bhil villages in southern Rajasthan, our research suggests, will continue to cook with biofuel on their chulhas for some time to come.

References

Baviskar, Amita. 1995. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.

Birkenholtz, Trevor. 2016. “Dispossessing Irrigators: Water Grabbing, Supply-Side Growth and Farmer Resistance in India.” Geoforum 69:94–105.

Chandrashekhar, Vaishnavi. 2015. “Up in Smoke: Why India is Still Looking for a Perfect Cookstove.” The Caravan: a Journal of Politics & Culture.  April 2015 issues.  Available at link.

Chatti, Deepti, Matthew Archer, Myles Lennon, and Michael Dove. 2017. “Exploring the Mundane: Towards an Ethnographic Approach to Bioenergy.” Energy Research & Social Science 30:28–34.

Cross, Jamie. 2013. “The 100th Object: Solar Lighting Technology and Humanitarian Goods.” Journal of Material Culture 18(4):367–387.

Dalberg Global Development Advisors. 2013. Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves: India Cookstoves and Fuels Market Assessment. Presentation. Available at: link.

de Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. 2000. “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30(2):225–263.

Hanna, Rema, Esther Duflo, and Michael Greenstone. 2016. “Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 8(1):80–114.

Jagger, Pamela. 2017. “2017 Provost’s Global Forum: Women’s Health and the Environment: Going Up in Smoke.” Paper presented at the 2017 Provost’s Global Forum “Women’s Health and the Environment: Going Up in Smoke”, University of Iowa, Iowa City, April 14, 2017.

Jagger, Pamela, and Charles Jumbe. 2016. “Stoves or Sugar? Willingness to Adopt Improved Cookstoves in Malawi.” Energy Policy 92:409–419.

Khandelwal, Meena, Matthew E. Hill, Jr., Paul Greenough, Jerry Anthony, Misha Quill, Marc Linderman, and H. S. Udaykumar. 2017. “Why Have Improved Cookstove Initiatives in India Failed?” World Development 92:13–27.

Kikkeri, Ramesh. 2017. “Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement Experience with Cookstoves in South India.” Paper presented at the Fulbright-Hays GPA Workshop, Udaipur, Rajasthan, January 7, 2017.

Parigi, F., M. D. Viscio, S. Amicabile, M. Testi, S. Rao, and H. S. Udaykumar. 2016. “High Efficient Mewar Angithi Stove Testing in Rural Kenya.” Paper presented at the 7th International Renewable Energy Congress (IREC).  Dates 22-24 March, 2016, in Hammamet, Tunisia.

Redfield, Peter. 2016. “Fluid Technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw and Microworlds of Humanitarian Design.” Social Studies of Science 46(2):159–183.

Sarin, Madhu. 1986. “Improved Chulha Programme: Boon or Disaster?”  Economic and Political Weekly, XXI(38-39):1709-1717.

Sinha, B. 2002. “The Indian Stove Programme: An Insider’s View—The Role of Society, Politics, Economics and Education. Boiling Point 48:23–26.

Smith, Kirk. 2000. “National Burden of Disease in Indian from Indoor Air Pollution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97(24):13286–13293.

———. 2002. “In Praise of Petroleum?” Science 298(5600):1847.

Subramanian, Meera. 2015. A River Runs Again. New York: Public Affairs.

Udaykumar, H. S., A. Kindig, S. Rao, M. Del Viscio, V. Kukillaya, N. Panwar, and D. Sharma. 2015. “How a Simple, Inexpensive Device Makes a Three-Stone Hearth as Efficient as an Improved Cookstove.” The Solutions Journal 6(4):53–60.

Yadama, Gautam N. 2013. Fire, Fuel and the Fate of 3 Billion: The State of the Energy Impoverished. New York: Oxford University Press.

The IkoToilet, meaning “Here is the toilet” in Swahili, is a Nairobi-wide public–private sanitation intervention that aims to address the lack of adequate sanitation options across the city. The core of IkoToilet’s model—pay-per-use public toilets—is by no means new. By turning the basic need into an experience of leisure and consumption, however, the IkoToilet aims to challenge the idea that the toilet is an unsuitable place to visit, use, let alone to hang around (Thieme 2010). IkoToilets are intended to provide a significant step-change in the quality of public toilets and to seed a drastic rise in common expectations concerning construction, maintenance, and cleanliness of public toilets.

Each IkoToilet facility is owned by EcoTact, a social enterprise that “invests in innovations to solve sanitation crisis in Africa and beyond.” Each IkoToilet has the same distinctive design, same construction, same color scheme, same branding, and, in theory at least, is maintained and cleaned to the same high standards. In addition to the toilets, IkoToilet facilities may also include a row of shoe-shining stations and a small kiosk for the sale of snacks and drinks that are rented out to “micro-entrepreneurs.” Each IkoToilet also includes “billboard” space, with advertising placements available above, outside, and inside the toilet. Revenue from microenterprise and advertising contributes to EcoTact’s return on investment.

Reinventing the Toilet

With more than 50% of people in the world now living in cities, one of the starkest paradoxes of modernity is reflected in the statistic that more people in the world today have access to a mobile phone than a safe and clean toilet (United Nations 2013). As such, the toilet has become both the symbolic and material locus for addressing water and sanitation poverty, framed by United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal 6.

The toilet has put the “unmentionable” (George 2008) on the map of development and humanitarianism. It has concentrated calls for collective attention in a singular, tangible object. For development organizations, an emphasis on the toilet has been effective in raising a broader set of questions and problems, from the spatial, material, and embodied practices of sanitation and the concerns for personal privacy, safety, and separation from disease vectors to the diversity of toilet designs. Most important, attention to the toilet as an object has called for the design and distribution of new toilets—“little development devices”—that can provide access to improved sanitation while further deferring large-scale infrastructural development in cities already marked by considerable uneven urban planning.

In the last 10 years international concerns with water and sanitation have turned Nairobi into a laboratory for the toilet. In the city’s low-income settlements inadequate sanitation is normalized, a social fact captured by the common refrain, “Diarrhea ni kawaida (is normal)”. The toilet has become the quintessential technical development problem in search of a fix (Li 2007), with toilet projects spanning the field of design, engineering, and digital technology. The toilet sits at a confluence of concerns with infrastructure and planning, hygiene, and social patterns of cleanliness, health outcomes, and the provision of cleaning services and has come to occupy new constellations of government and nongovernmental actors. Across Nairobi development practitioners, community activists, academics, and, increasingly, social entrepreneurs (business people who identify themselves with “social innovation” or “social business”) now “give a shit” about sanitation. Here the reinvention of the toilet is no longer simply a public health imperative or an ecological design challenge; it is also a business opportunity.

In Nairobi, a combination of approaches has produced a portfolio of privatized, imperfect, but functioning alternatives to nonexistent or inadequate government infrastructure and delivery (Bohnert et al. 2016). Yet, because these interventions are all public, communal, or shared toilets, they have all been obliged to confront and work off of existing infrastructures and social norms. These interventions all depend on communities taking an active role in improving their sanitation options. They all need to work within (not necessarily presume to undo or move beyond) the very real urban constraints and pragmatic coping strategies related to compact and modular living.

Mathare alley way between houses, 2010. Photo by: Claudia Pursals

These interventions have practically and rhetorically turned the toilet into a development device. A range of off-grid toilets—from Ecotact’s IkoToilet hardware-franchise model to an eco-sanitation model (Sanergy’s Fresh Life Toilet)—have shifted attention away from the possibility of large-scale networked infrastructural improvements toward the everyday micro-politics of sanitation (Thieme 2015). These toilets reflect particular claims about the ability of specific market-based interventions to address sanitation poverty and have set in motion a series of narratives that make these claims travel globally.

But what kind of toilet should be promoted?

The Sanitation Problem

In December 2009, a group of private sector individuals, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based entrepreneurs gathered at the PanAfric Hotel in Nairobi for a meeting hosted by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme to discuss the management of public and community toilets in the city of Nairobi. “Water is life, but sanitation is dignity,” said the moderator in his opening remarks.

Two years later, in February 2011, more than 100 residents from Mathare, one of Nairobi’s oldest and largest informal settlements, gathered in a community hall for an event hosted by a citizen-led geographic information systems (GIS) mapping initiative called Map Mathare to define their priorities. Run as a participatory workshop, the breakout groups reported back with various themes that were then clustered, and finally the facilitators asked that two dominant themes be identified so all the trained community “mappers” could start plotting the GIS points of the landmarks representing these two themes. Near the end of the three-hour workshop, note cards were pinned to the wall in the front of the room representing the two preferred areas of concern within each breakout group. Each card mentioned health as one, and water and sanitation as the other.

How can the lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in the city and especially in Nairobi’s low-income residential areas be addressed? These two events reflected the gaps in perception and experience as institutions and grassroots groups set out to address Nairobi’s “sanitation problem.”

The event held at the PanAfric Hotel stressed two points: the heightened demand for more public and community toilets, and the increasing interest in enterprise-led approaches to tackling challenges of urban poverty. Although the individuals present at the meeting came from different sectors, with the private sector as a minority, the consensus was that, as one person brazenly put it, “Shit is big business!”

In contrast, at the grassroots community event in Mathare, the issues raised stemmed from a deeper reflection. Mathare’s toilet blocks are a metonym for many of the surrounding problems related to urban services facing this mosaic of impoverished and marginalized neighborhoods. In the discussion, community members reflected on the multiple aspects of the sanitation challenge (including issues of land tenure, infrastructure, and social behavior) as well as a recognition that it would never be enough simply to agree on the need for more toilets. Here public toilets and the toilet block were part of a commons. As David Waithaka, founder of the community-based NGO Mathare Association, put it, “In Mathare there are very few things that can be said to serve the public good. There is no community hall; there is no secondary school. But one of the things that you could say, it is ours, it belongs to us, is the public toilet.”[1]

These two events reflect the ways in which the problem of sanitation is being mobilized in Nairobi. The development sector presents sanitation as a site of entrepreneurship, and sees market opportunities including job creation and private service provision. Meanwhile, sanitation activists see opportunities for community mobilization, claiming basic urban services as a human rights issue. Although sanitation entrepreneurs operating in the hustle economy “make do” under conditions of adversity and see the absence of public services as an income opportunity for private providers (Thieme 2015; 2017), sanitation activists mobilize against and call out the absentee state (Appadurai 2001).

Tabitha taking a break following a community clean on World Toilet Day. Mathare 2010. Photo by: Sasha Turrentine

The Public Toilet

In the single-room homes of Mathare, the toilet is a luxury good and a distant reality. For most low-income households, the home is purposefully modular. The “bedroom” becomes at different points in the day the kitchen, the sitting room, the work station for in-home businesses, the after-school homework study area, and the site of assembly for self-help groups discussing their saving scheme. The bathing corner is used for cooking one minute, washing your feet the next. The toilet is set apart from the home not only because it is more convenient, but because it is also considered more hygienic to keep your ablutions far away from your dwelling, despite the very real security concern, particularly for women and children, of a long walk to the nearest toilet after dark (Amnesty International 2010).

These shared or “public” toilets (a reality for most of Nairobi’s citizens) reveal the multifarious considerations related to the building, maintenance, management, access, and financing of ablution blocks, along with the often less documented but crucial everyday investments of social life that make a common resource work for and serve the needs of multiple end users (Thieme 2015).

First, the public toilet block serves as a proxy for the self-contained toilet that people in the community don’t have at home, turning private bodily practices into a shared affair.

Across Nairobi’s low-income settlements the toilet has come to showcase moments of “excessive attention” (Simone 2010:40), whether through externally sponsored rehabilitation schemes or protests aimed at symbolizing dire infrastructural dilapidation. From Mathare to Kibera and Korogocho, the rehabilitation of public toilets has been a highly visible affair, undertaken with sponsorship from the German Embassy, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme, as well as local NGOs. Despite the commemorative plate on the outside wall featuring a date and the name of a sponsor, these sanitation prestige projects often appear to give little thought to their sustainable management, and they are often ill maintained or falling apart.

Meanwhile, against the backdrop of rapid and often makeshift urbanization among low-income urban citizens, toilets and the sanitation commons have become highly politicized spaces in Nairobi and beyond (McFarlane et al. 2014). In South Africa’s “poo wars,” for example, protesters against township sanitation poverty dumped human waste on the steps of City Hall to make public the inadequate and often ignored infrastructural politics (McFarlane and Silver 2016; Redfield and Robins 2016; Robins 2013).

In Nairobi too, toilets in informal settlements have become an integral part of urban poverty politics. In neighborhoods like Mathare, toilets have come to exemplify the deliberations and potential tensions related to the commons; the demolition of that “public good” becomes grounds for political mobilization.[2]

A Beautiful Toilet

In 2008 EcoTact installed an IkoToilet in Mathare, the first and only installation to date in one of Nairobi’s low-income settlements. The Mathare IkoToilet was launched with much fanfare, with the company claiming that the community would discover the benefits of “hygienic public utilities” if one builds a “beautiful toilet” (http://www.ikotoilet.org) and would pay for monthly membership. It was established on what EcoTact described as a “more equitable” membership model rather than a pay-per-use model. Under the model, households were invited to buy a “membership card” for KES 100 (USD $1.35), which allowed them a month’s access to the toilet. The toilet was meant to be self-sustaining, with revenues from memberships and UV-filtered municipal water sales paying salaries and other operating expenses. EcoTact pitched the IkoToilet as a community hub for other economic and social activity, with the prospect that it would open up other revenue and impact opportunities.

The location of the IkoToilet in Mathare, however, was far from ideal. In such a densely populated community, finding a plot large enough to build an IkoToilet was no small feat.

Being selective about its location would have delayed the project for years and would have certainly driven up costs, so the toilet was built in an area called Kosovo, off a secondary road, behind three rows of homes, where it was poorly visible.

Some 300 meters away from this location was an open field that the neighboring community had always used for free (if risky) open defecation. Without a significant marketing/education/awareness campaign to sensitize the community, potential IkoToilet members, to the dangers of open defecation and the benefits of a clean, high-quality toilet, that field remained the community’s primary toilet and undercut IkoToilet. The assumption that everyone would recognize the IkoToilet as a significantly better, “more dignified,” safer, and ultimately less expensive option was overly optimistic.

Ecotact’s challenges in Mathare appeared to demonstrate that improving sanitation in a low-income urban settlement could not be approached only from an infrastructure, “hardware” angle (Kar 2005). Yet the impact of its IkoToilet, measured against the company’s objective of raising the profile, awareness, and expectations of public toilets, was positive. The installation in Mathare generated national and international discussion about public sanitation. By 2010, EcoTact had built 40 other IkoToilets across Nairobi, including installations in Nairobi’s central business district and other high-traffic, high-volume, higher-income areas. The company pointed to IkoToilet’s success in these areas as proof that its toilets could be positive communal points and centers for various economic and social activities, and its reputation grew.

The Fresh Life Toilet

A more recent and perhaps more comprehensive solution to Mathare’s “sanitation crisis” has been led by another Kenyan-based eco-sanitation social enterprise: Sanergy. In 2011 Sanergy received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through their Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to build a “sustainable sanitation value chain model” in two of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements (Chonghaile 2012). In line with the terms and conditions of the Reinvent The Toilet Challenge, Sanergy’s prefabricated toilets (known as Fresh Life Toilets) do not require connections to water or sewer infrastructures and are set up as local franchises, with local residents (known as “Fresh Life Operators”) purchasing and operating the facilities, and with mobile waste collectors (known as the “Fresh Life Frontline” team) collecting filled “cartridges” and replacing them with empty ones, ensuring the regular removal of “shit”.

The team behind Sanergy studied IkoToilet, and their model is designed to be a holistic solution by both installing new shared toilets in neighborhoods with high demand, removing the waste from the community, and promoting job creation in local economies with high rates of underemployment.

Fresh Life field officers and customers have raised other questions about the installation and maintenance costs. In addition to those costs, a common grievance is that some local residents are uncomfortable “shitting in a blue plastic barrel” where their waste remains “in place” until it is collected, and having to pay a higher fee than they are accustomed to. Other local residents have remarked that Sanergy’s claim to produce “organic waste” at the end of the value chain is an unrealistic expectation, with farmers outside the city unlikely to want to buy fertilizer “made from the shit that comes from the slums.”[3] Two Sanergy Fresh Life toilets were built inside a primary school in Village 4A, one of the poorest areas of Mathare. One third of all the school’s children are orphans; when I visited the school in 2016, the head teacher explained that a benefactor paid for the installation of the toilets, but the school was struggling to meet the annual service fee because most children do not pay school fees.

Here Sanergy faces a dual challenge: turning a public health need into a market with a payable demand, and confronting the cultural taboos associated with human waste (Thieme 2015).

Bottom-Up Innovation

One common thread across these and other private sector–led sanitation interventions in Nairobi is a concern to produce “empowered” sanitation subjects: people who might serve as beneficiaries, customers, entrepreneurs, community health officers, “natural leaders,” or facilitators in partnership with sanitation companies. In some cases, the end user is a citizen recipient of the right to better sanitation. In other cases, the end user is an agent of improvement. In all cases, the end user becomes a “consumer-client” of a given facility, service, or product offering.

As they navigate these roles, people’s responses to the problem of sanitation necessarily vacillate between public and private action. In questions of maintenance, management, and payment it can appear a matter for consensus. Public, shared, or communal toilets are inextricably tied to community economics and the quotidian, often invisible, labor involved in maintaining these sanitation commons. Collective action might involve establishing a willingness to pay a private sanitation provider, or resolving the disputes that inevitably occur when any group of people share a common resource (Thieme and DeKoszmovszky 2012). Meanwhile, everyday sanitation practice no longer only involves making a choice between defecating in open spaces or in a shared latrine; it now also involves oscillating between the private actors who sell or provide sanitation as a service in the absence of fully public infrastructure.

As little development devices, the toilets installed in Mathare are shaping and reworking sanitation experiences and relationships. But these toilet projects might, in turn, shape future innovations “from the bottom up” by providing a useful extension and reorientation of current critiques of market-led development discourse and practice.

Nairobi’s sanitation solutions set out to render formerly public services as privately delivered goods, producing entrepreneurial subjects, turning social needs into market demands, and appending public health messages to consumer products (Cross and Street 2009). But they also demonstrate how, if they are to be successful, future interventions at this nexus of public health and social entrepreneurship must address people’s perceptions and experiences of sanitation spaces, from the shared latrine to the sites of open defecation. In Nairobi, the low-income public toilet is not just an engineering challenge or an entrepreneurial project; it is a place, situated within the broader struggles of the ablution block.

References

Amnesty International. 2010. Insecurity and Dignity: Women’s Experiences in the Slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2001. “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics.” Environment & Urbanization 13(2):23–43.

Bohnert, K., Anna N. Chard, Alex Mwaki, et.al. 2016 “Comparing Sanitation Delivery Modalities in Urban Informal Settlement Schools: A Randomized Trial in Nairobi, Kenya.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13(12):1189.

Chonghaile. Clar Ni. 2012. “From Flying Toilets to Fertiliser, Slum Sanitation in Nairobi Is Changing.” The Guardian, November 19. Available at link.

Cross, Jamie and Alice Street. 2009. “Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid” Anthropology Today, 25(4):4-9.

George, Rose. 2008. The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste. London, UK: Portobello Books.

Kar, Kamal, and Katherine Pasteur. 2005. “Subsidy or Self-Respect? Community Led Total Sanitation.” Institute of Development Studies, Working Paper 257, pp. 1–62.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McFarlane, C., R. Desai, and S. Graham. 2014. “Informal Urban Sanitation: Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(5):989–1011.

McFarlane, C., and J. Silver 2016. “The Poolitical City: ‘Seeing Sanitation’ and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town.” Antipode 49(1):125–148. doi:10.1111/anti.12264

Redfield, Peter, and Steven Robins. 2016. “An Index of Waste: Humanitarian Design, ‘Dignified Living’ and the Politics of Infrastructure in Cape Town.” Anthropology Southern Africa 39(2):145–162. doi:10.1080/23323256.2016.1172942

Robins, S. 2013. “How Poo Became Political.” The Cape Times (Cape Town), July 2, p. 9.

Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2010. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar. New York: Routledge.

Thieme, Tatiana. 2010. “Youth, Waste and Work in Mathare: Whose Business and Whose Politics?’’ Environment and Urbanization 22(2):333–352.

Thieme, Tatiana. 2013. “The ‘Hustle’ Amongst Youth Entrepreneurs in Mathare’s Informal Waste Economy.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7(3):389–412.

Thieme, Tatiana. 2015. “Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs, and Social Needs into Market Demands: Corporate-Community Encounters in Nairobi, Kenya. Geoforum 59:228–239.

Thieme, Tatiana. 2017. “The hustle economy: Informality, uncertainty and the geographies of getting by.” Progress in Human Geography. Online first at link.

Thieme, Tatiana, and Justin DeKoszmovszky. 2012. “Community Cleaning Services: Combining Market- and Donor-Based Approaches to Urban Sanitation and Youth Engagement.” Field Action Science Reports (FACTS). Paris, France: Institut Veolia Environment.

United Nations. 2013. Deputy UN chief calls for urgent action to tackle global sanitation crisis. Available online at: link.

Notes

[1] Interview with David Waithaka in front of Kambi Motto public toilet, Mathare, May 18, 2010.

[2] The Member of Parliament (MP) of the constituency in which Mathare is situated, for instance, made public toilets integral to her political platform.

[3] These insights are based on a series of unstructured interviews and informal conversations with the Fresh Life field officer, a primary school head teacher, and public health community organizer in Mathare during field trips in 2012 and 2016.

Starting April 2018, read issue #10: Chokepoints!

Migrants gather in “jungles” at the mouth of the Chunnel, awaiting an opportunity to cross from mainland Europe into the UK undetected. Somali pirates attack ships queuing up at the Bab-El-Mandeb strait, a critical passage between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. A flash crash in the stock market triggers a digital “circuit breaker” that instantly shuts off digital trade until cooler heads prevail. Transcontinental internet connectivity is funneled through bundles of undersea cables, making global information flow susceptible to disruption by something as minor as a misplaced ship anchor. These tunnels, corridors, and cables illustrate how some conduits can become chokepoints, sites where malfunction, blockage, or strategic pressure constricts—or “chokes”—the flows and connections upon which contemporary life depends. Limn 10 brings together anthropologists, geographers, photographers, media scholars, sociologists, ecologists, and historians to explore chokepoints. We ask: When and why do these sites of constriction and connection emerge? How and for whom do they work? And what do chokepoints reveal about the the past, present, and future? Read More

The Shelter

On January 26, 2017, the IKEA refugee shelter was declared the worldwide Design of the Year in a unanimous decision.[1] When I interviewed one of the jurors about the process I was told that they’d chosen the “obvious winner”: the IKEA shelter was high profile, it had featured widely in the media, it was a positive story with a clear social purpose, and it offered a practical solution to the so-called “refugee crisis,” one of the most significant issues of the previous twelve months.[2] The London Design Museum has been awarding the “Design of the Year” for a decade now, celebrating examples that “promote or deliver change, enable access, extend design practice, or capture the spirit of the year” (Beazley 2017). The IKEA refugee shelter seemed to match all of these aims, claiming to be modular, sustainable, long lasting, recyclable, easily assembled, affordable, and scalable. It was installed on the Greek islands to shelter newly arrived refugees in 2015, and it came with the backing of the United Nations (UN) Refugee Agency, who purchased 15,000 units for distribution around the world.

The juror I spoke to explained that the shelter won because it “tackles one of the defining issues of the moment: providing shelter in an exceptional situation whether caused by violence and disaster…. [It] provides not only a design but secure manufacture as well as distribution.” A statement described the project as “relevant and even optimistic,” concluding, “it shows the power of design to respond to the conditions we are in and transform them” (Beazley 2017; personal interview, April 25, 2017, Design Museum, London).

It is easy to understand why this shelter has generated so much interest since it was first announced in 2013. It has received funding from IKEA, a company that has shaped so much of everyday life in the Global North and whose minimalist modernism has populated so many domestic environments. As Keith Murphy points out, there is a social democratic spirit underpinning so much of Swedish design, a combination of simplicity, affordability, and universality that both reflects and promotes a more egalitarian social order (Murphy 2015; see also Garvey 2017). When applied to refugee housing, this has all the makings of positive story. The media are given something their readers can relate to—the experience of unpacking and constructing IKEA flat-pack furniture—and can connect it to a problem that concerns us all: how to house the millions of refugees we see on the news. The IKEA refugee shelter, the story goes, can be assembled in four to six hours with a basic manual and no specialist tools. Everything comes in two compact boxes, much like those that contain your new bed and table from the IKEA store. More attractively, the design arrives with a number of innovative little tricks, including a photovoltaic panel that provides sufficient electricity to power a small light and mobile phone charger. It seems like a heartwarming example of philanthro-capitalism, good design, and humanitarian innovation (Scott-Smith 2016). What’s not to like?

The IKEA refugee shelter. Photo: Mark E. Breeze

For anyone who has actually seen the shelter up close, it looks rather mundane after this hyperbolic description. It has a rectangular floor plan, vertical walls, and a pitched roof. The shelter is fairly small, covering an area of 17.5 square meters, and it is designed to house a family of up to five people. When inside, you can look up and see the entire structure laid bare: a standalone steel frame with imposing horizontal beams, onto which foam panels are clipped. These panels are made from polyolefin, a light, flexible plastic, and they have the feeling and texture of swimming floats. They have been attached to the frame with hand-tightened bolts and brackets, and the shelter has four small ‘window’ openings, ventilation slots, and a lockable door. The main designer described its chunky, basic appearance as the kind of house “a 5-year-old would draw” (personal interview, May 18, 2017, Stockholm). It is, indeed, visually uninspiring, but this is because it is meant to be basic. Like much of IKEA’s product line, it is mass-produced, economical modernism. It is meant to offer a shelter that is immediate, quick, affordable, and easily transportable, staying as close as possible to the price and weight of the main alternative: the tent.

“It is, indeed, visually uninspiring…” The IKEA Shelter. Photos: Mark E. Breeze.

Tents have been the go-to shelter for humanitarian organizations for more than 50 years. The UN Refugee Agency distributes tens of thousands of them annually, and they are still valued for their lightweight, inexpensive simplicity. To be taken seriously as a humanitarian product, therefore, the IKEA shelter needs to be comparable to the tent in terms of price and weight while making some crucial improvements. There are four, in particular, that can be found in this design. First, the IKEA shelter provides increased security through a lockable door. Second, it provides greater privacy through firmer and more opaque walls. Third, it provides improved communication with a mobile phone-charging station. And fourth, it lasts considerably longer: up to four years rather than just one. These improvements encapsulate the basic requirements for dignified living according to the designers, combining security, privacy, durability, and connection to the outside world. These features, the narrative goes, are particularly important given the protracted nature of so many contemporary refugee situations and the likelihood of a lengthy exile.[3]

When I spoke to the designers about dignity, they came back again and again to the same material expressions, which were fascinating in their tangibility and their conception of refugee social worlds. Dignity meant being able to stand up in the IKEA shelter, which is impossible in a tent. Dignity meant having walls that were “knocky”: firmer, more secure, more resonant when tapped, which distinguished the materials from tarpaulin. Dignity meant privacy: whereas silhouettes can cause a problem in tents, the IKEA shelter does not reveal activity inside when the lights are on at night; its material is more opaque and disperses the shadows. Such improvements, however small, allow the design team to mobilize a more expansive, idealistic rhetoric. In its publicity materials, the shelter has become a “safer, more dignified home away from home for millions of displaced people across the world.” It has channeled “smart design, innovation and modern technology” to offer “a sense of peace, identity and dignity.” It is “universally welcoming”, a “home away from home” that balances “the needs of millions of people living in different cultures, climates and regions with a rational production—a single solution” (Better Shelter 2015; personal interview, May 19, 2017, Stockholm, Sweden). 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 Reaction

The day after the announcement of the prize I sensed a collective sigh of despair among my colleagues working on refugee issues, which was tangible in personal conversations, snarky asides, and exasperated emails. The failures of the shelter were, for many of them, far too obvious. It was meager, limited, with no proper floor, no insulation, no natural light, and with a structure that let in drafts and dust. It had been oversold, under-ordered, and was described as sustainable when in fact it involved flying piles of metal and plastic around the world. It ignored established practice in the humanitarian shelter sector, which advocates the use of local materials and abundant local labor, and, above all, it was accompanied by an insistent triumphalism, with media reports pushing the narrative that an intractable problem had been solved. It had not. Managing refugee arrivals is a complex political issue that requires sustained political engagement, legal reform, and advocacy in host states to ensure investment in welfare and protection. Although these were not the aims of the IKEA refugee shelter, such lavish praise and attention, my informants felt, were a distraction. Many such “innovative designs” have become a fetish, creating a mistaken reassurance that circumstances can be controlled while obscuring a series of more serious, structural issues that remain unaddressed (Scott-Smith 2013).
 

The most tangible criticisms of the IKEA shelter, I soon realized, came from two opposing directions. On the one hand, there were those who argued the shelter did too little. It was a mean little space, they suggested, that looked like a garden shed or, due to its plastic panels, a chemical toilet. This line of critique usually came from architects, who filed the object contemptuously under “product design” and declared that it involved no architectural thinking at all. Architecture, they pointed out, should respond to the site and local environment, not mass-produce a universal design with no adaptability or control. Architecture should create sensitive and carefully planned responses to specific problems, not ignore basic elements such as insulation, proper flooring, and natural light. Architecture should also be pleasing to the eye. If you took the Vitruvian triad of architectural virtues, the IKEA shelter seemed to fail on every count. Firmitas, utilitas, and venustas was the aim, but the shelter was flimsy rather than firm, flawed rather than useful, ugly rather than beautiful.[4] It was particularly galling for this group of critics that the shelter won not just Design of the Year, but that it won the architectural category as well.

The other type of criticism came from humanitarians. They argued not that the shelter did too little, but that it did too much. It provided a fully integrated, flat-pack solution when this was rarely required or appropriate. It flew in a prefabricated house when there were better opportunities to work from the bottom up. It lionized designers when design was rarely a priority. Unlike architects, humanitarians were working in a context of limited time and limited resources. They worked with the mantra that “shelter is a process not a product,” a slogan that derives from the work of Ian Davis (1978), one of the founding thinkers of the humanitarian shelter sector, who argued that humanitarians needed to focus on the way people shelter themselves. Davis said that disaster-affected communities had their own techniques for finding and building shelter, suggesting that humanitarian shelter should mean discouraging designers and other outside “experts.” The priority should be to provide materials such as wood, nails, tarpaulin, and tape that help people build their own homes. These could be used and reused as people expanded their accommodation. The crucial task, in other words, was not to provide finished shelters, but to support people in their own process of sheltering.[5]

The Tension

In the middle of May 2017, I took a trip to Stockholm to meet the IKEA shelter’s design team and see how they navigated these two very different criticisms. I arrived at their headquarters on the 11th floor of the old Ericsson building in a southern suburb of the city, and spent some days learning about their brief, their aims, and their ways of thinking. The first thing that became clear was that this was not, in fact, an “IKEA shelter.” It was a designed by a group of independent Swedish industrial designers who had met at college and developed the basic idea in discussion with humanitarians in Geneva. They later received substantial financial support from the IKEA Foundation, which allowed them to refine, test, and iterate the idea, eventually leading to a commitment from the UN Refugee Agency to purchase a large number of units.

As I learned more about the project, it soon became clear that the story of the shelter seemed to be constantly swinging like a pendulum. It was caught between the expansive utopian idealism that so often underpins the announcement of new humanitarian designs and the restricted, mundane implications of their actual implementation.  Both types of criticism, in other words, were basically correct: the IKEA shelter is both ‘too much’ and ‘too little’. It is clearly a product rather than a process, so it ends up being overwrought, top-down, and “too much” for aid workers who are skeptical of universal solutions. At the same time, it has been designed to be cheap and lightweight, so it will always be “too little” for those with bigger ideas about what design can achieve (especially as it lacks many of the basic elements that are crucial to architecture, such as proper flooring, insulation, light, strength, and beauty). The formal name for the shelter seems to encapsulate this tension. It is properly called the “Better Shelter”, and I was reprimanded in Stockholm for using the name “IKEA shelter,” which remains in common parlance but has never been formally adopted.[6] This name emphasizes the restricted horizon of improvement. The product aspires to be better, but it is no more than shelter. It idealistically attempts to improve the world, but pursues this by providing basic shelter rather than engaging with a more expansive terrain of housing.

“…a fire safety test on the IKEA shelter.” Photo: Mark E. Breeze.

The problem of doing too much and too little was powerfully illustrated in December 2015, when the Swiss city of Zurich conducted a fire safety test on the IKEA shelter. The video of the test was screened on the news and subsequently circulated online: it featured a series of terrifying images in which a small fire, illuminating first the translucent sides of the shelter, suddenly engulfed the scene in an explosion of flames and molten plastic. The media picked up on the story, Zurich cancelled its intended use of the shelters for new migrant arrivals, and distribution of the shelter began to slow. This was perhaps the biggest challenge the design had faced since its inception, and the fire test led to more than a year of additional work as the team made changes to the shelter’s design – mostly adjustments to the panel material. During this process, however, the design team found no clear code to work. Fire retardancy standards and testing procedures could not be found in the usual humanitarian handbooks, and so the team felt hostage to unrealistic criteria. The Swiss tests had compared the shelter with a permanent residential building, which seemed unfair (as a tent, which was the closest equivalent, would fare no better), yet it seemed impossible to object when the Swiss fire tests were released. The shelter was meant to be “better,” and the whiff of double standards would drift over the scene very quickly if they argued this was a shelter for a different population. The idea that refugee accommodation should be held to lower standards would not be good publicity for a product so concerned with the promoting dignity.

The fire tests raised a number of questions. Is this a “slightly” Better Shelter? Or is it “sometimes” a better shelter, depending on location and context? And when, exactly, is it a better shelter – in which times and places? One thing is clear: most people would not choose to live in one of these structures because of its obvious limitations. It has no floor or insulation, barely any natural light, and a tiny living space, even if its three or four tangible improvements certainly make it better than a tent. But then again, it should be better, as it costs a good deal more than a tent: currently twice the price of a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) standard family model. Is this a problem? Don’t we expect a better shelter to be a more expensive shelter? Yet how much is too much? What if twice the price means aiding half as many people? Is this a “better” result?

The UNHCR Standard Family Tent. Source: UNHCR Core Relief Items Catalogue

The Lagom Shelter

Perhaps this, in the end, defines the wider world of little development devices and humanitarian goods: they are simultaneously too much and too little. They are vulnerable to the charge of being too limited as well as the charge of being too expansive. They fail to tackle fundamental global injustices, but they still make numerous ideological assumptions about human life and human dignity beneath their search for modest improvements. The little development device oscillates between its grand visions of human improvement and its modest engineering in a tiny frame. The humanitarian good balances a philanthro-capitalist utopia with the minimalist aim of saving lives. All of this is encapsulated in the slightly Better Shelter. When I discussed these thoughts with the team in Stockholm, they basically agreed, and reached for the Swedish word lagom to describe their aims. It is tricky to translate, but means something like “the right amount,” “neither too little nor too much.” The Better Shelter is lagom because it has to be viable as well as adding value. It has to negotiate with the critics who claim it is “too much” as well as those who say it does “too little.” The shelter could never please architectural critics because it was only designed as a cheap, short-term home, and it would never please bottom-up humanitarian practitioners because it was too top-down and complete. Lagom captures the search for balance while reflecting a wider ethos of democratic Swedish design.[7]

Yet aspiring to be lagom does not make the central tension disappear. Just like being “better,” being lagom depends on context. What counts as “just enough” depends on where you are, who you are, and what you are doing. Something lagom in Sweden may not be lagom elsewhere. This became apparent just before the Better Shelter was launched, when a handful of units were shipped to Lebanon for a practical test with refugees. On their arrival in the Bekaa Valley, a group of armed and angry Lebanese neighbors appeared. The shelters, in their view, were too permanent. It did not matter that they had no foundations. It did not matter that they could be removed in less than a day. It did not matter that the walls and roof would degrade in just a few years. The structures were too solid, and the authorities agreed.[8] The Better Shelter had become “too much” for the Lebanese political context, just as in Switzerland it had become “too little.” The same features that made it insufficient in one country made it extravagant in another.

So although the Better Shelter tries to be better everywhere, it can never hope to adapt to the infinite complexity of refugee crises and its scales became disrupted when butting up against hard political realities. Since 2013, the designers have been working assiduously in Stockholm to optimize every component: changing the clips and panel material, redesigning the bolts and vents, refining the door and frame. They think an improved product can overcome both the Swiss fire tests and the Lebanese resistance. But what is “better” will always change with context. The Lagom Shelter can only be truly Lagom on the 11th floor of the old Ericcson building in Stockholm. As soon as it moves, the balance changes. Lagom cannot be built into any universal form.

References

Beazley. 2017. “Flat-packed refugee shelter named best design of 2016”. Beazley Design of the Year Press Release, 26.01.2017. Available at link

Better Shelter. 2015. Better Shelter: A Home Away From Home. Better Shelter Promotional Leaflet. Available at link.

Davis, I. 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford, UK: Oxford Polytechnic Press.

Garvey, P. 2017. Unpacking Ikea Cultures: Swedish Design for the Purchasing Masses. London, UK: Routledge.

Murphy, K. 2015. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Scott-Smith, T. 2013. “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects and the Management of Malnutrition in Emergencies.” Third World Quarterly 34(5): 913-28.

———. 2016. “Humanitarian Neophilia: The Innovation Turn and Its Implications.” Third World Quarterly 37(12): 2229–2251.

———. 2017. “The Humanitarian-Architect Divide.” Forced Migration Review 55:67-8.

Sewell, Abby, and Charlotte Alfred. 2017. “Evicted Refugees in Lebanon Have Nowhere Left to Run.” Refugees Deeply, September 28. Available at link.

Notes

[1] The phrase “IKEA refugee shelter” is a misnomer. As explained below, this object has been produced by a group of Swedish industrial designers who received financial support and sponsorship from the IKEA Foundation. The formal name for the product is the Better Shelter, but the phrase “IKEA refugee shelter” is still widely used. I continue to use it partly for the sake of recognition, and partly to highlight the intimate connection with IKEA, which is central to the story of this product despite being made distant through several degrees of institutional separation.

[2] I use scare quotes around the idea of “crisis” here for three reasons: first, because the “refugee crisis” is based on a doubtful claim that the number of refugees in the world today is “unprecedented”. Second, because much larger refugee numbers routinely arrive in developing countries – this situation is only a “crisis” because it has affected the rich world. And third, the crisis has not been a result of refugee numbers, which is relatively manageable, but the political response. If anything, this is not a refugee crisis, but a hospitality crisis.

[3] The whole design of this shelter emerged in part from UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s (UNHCR’s) recognition that refugees are spending ever-longer periods in camps, and therefore tents are no longer suitable due to their short lifespan.

[4] For this reflection on the relationship with the Vitruvian virtues, I am grateful to Mark E. Breeze.

[5] The critics do not even agree. Humanitarians have their biases; architects have theirs. I have written about this tension in the June 2017 issue of Forced Migration Review (Scott-Smith 2017).

[6] Its previous name was the Refugee Housing Unit (RHU), which made for a popular humanitarian acronym but was never very catchy. The rebrand as ‘Better Shelter’ tried to quash the use of “IKEA Shelter” completely, which is too reminiscent of corporate sponsorship.

[7] IKEA have developed a Lagom project in recent years. See here.

[8] For more on the political circumstances of the “no camp” policy in Lebanon, see Sewell and Alfred (2017).

A contribution by Dr Kayleigh Hodgkinson-Murphy and Dr Angela Daly.

The QUT Pathways to Ethical Data project combines the interdisciplinary expertise of Dr Angela Daly, Dr Kate Devitt and Dr Monique Mann, assisted by Dr Kayleigh Hodgkinson-Murphy, to investigate and promote ethical data practices & initiatives, towards a fair and just digital economy. The team members are co-editing an INC Theory on Demand book on ‘Good Data’ and currently have a call out for proposed chapters for the book, which will be published in late 2018.

Last month, on 22nd November, approximately 50 industry practitioners and academics gathered at Queensland University of Technology’s Gardens Point campus in Brisbane, Australia to participate in the ‘Pathways to Ethical Data’ workshop – known as ‘Good Data’ for short. Collecting participants from across Australia and overseas, as well as from a variety of industry, government and discipline backgrounds, the workshop sought to examine and discuss the complex issues surrounding ‘good’ and ‘ethical’ data practices.

Early in the workshop, Dr Kate Devitt from QUT facilitated an activity that asked everyone to order themselves from most to least dystopian in their view of data practices today and in the future. This activity served not only as an introduction between participants but as an introduction to the depth and breadth of opinions held on the practices of data collection, retention, research, and use. Many participants stood around the centre of the line, reflecting the general group opinion that data is neither inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather that it’s the structures and practices surrounding the collection, retention or use of data that has an impact on whether the data can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

The themes that appeared during these early discussions were revisited in the longer talks given by various professionals in the field. Associate Professor Raymond Lovett (ANU), Dr Donna Cormack (University of Otago Wellington) and Dr Vanessa Lee (University of Sydney) spoke to the group on perspectives of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, identifying the specific complexities in both collecting and using data relating to Indigenous populations. Their discussions paralleled issues raised within the group discussions, namely that good data needs to engage with the community and further consideration needs to be given to data practices that reproduce colonial structures. Following this, a collection of lightening talks paired industry professionals with academics to speak in detail on particular topics such as community wifi initiatives, electronic health records, the ethics of open data and the recent ‘robodebt’ controversy in Australia where the government has badly implemented algorithmic decision-making to identify overpayments of welfare. These talks gave an opportunity to blend industry expertise with a broader academic framework and led to passionate and spirited discussion throughout the room.

The workshop proved to be an informative and valuable introduction to the project – identifying just how complex the issues surrounding data can be. However, while participants were honest about the very real issues and problems currently enmeshed in various industry and government data practices, there was also considerable discussion about the routes available to move towards more ethical data futures.

Following the daytime workshop, the QUT Good Data project team partnered with Thoughtworks’ Brisbane office for a public evening event. After a technical demonstration of bias and discrimination in machine learning, QUT’s Dr Monique Mann facilitated a discussion with special guest Asher Wolf, a well-known information journalist, digital activist and founder of the world-wide CryptoParty movement. Asher spoke about her own journey as an activist and fighter for good information and good data to great applause from a packed audience. A good end to a good day of good data!

Do you want to participate, consider sending in a proposal to the Call.