With the rapid urbanisation and migration from rural to urban cities, more than 150.000 men women and children are homeless in New Delhi. With the pilot project ekSHELTERS, MicroHome Solutions (mHS) City Lab envisioned simple tents, easy to assemble and disassemble, to provide shelter to homeless people. In collaboration with the Indo-Global Social Service Society (IGSSS), they identified families to distribute the shelters to, and also gathered feedback from to be able to improve the design of the tents.
The pilot was held over 17 months: mHS City Lab and IGSSS set up a crowd-funding campaign that made possible the production of the tents. Then feedback was collected over a period of 7 months from 7 locations where the total of 116 ekSHELTERS were distributed to families in Delhi.
These kind of shelters could also be very useful in a context of post disaster, like earthquakes or floods: they are simple temporary shelters easy to erect in a very short time, to face emergency.
These shelters are one temporary but valid solution to face this situation: they are financially affordable, made with low-cost materials, and thus scalable, with a design easy to understand, build and copy.
Working in collaboration with those primarily affected is essential to really grasp their difficulties. Furthermore, it is a process of inclusion that empowers these invisible residents: it allows them to get involved and participate in the development of local neighborhoods that will improve their safety, health and overall inclusion into cities.
This is another initiative documented by Towards the Human City.
