Natural disasters are a widespread phenomenon, which has destroyed entire habitable areas at times, leaving through its passage hundreds of thousands of dead, injured and homeless.
Housing these people is the hardest problem a state has to solve after such a disaster occurs. Millions of people around the world have temporarily been housed in rough accommodation, often under unacceptable conditions of living.
The continual improvement of construction materials, in combination with the spread and advance of technology, nowadays, give us the opportunity to design temporary accommodations for such populations which can provide comfort and qualitative living, under a low budget.
The target of this project is to design an autonomic and functional unit of inhabitation, which can be established rapidly in unlimited numbers under any geographic features, creating settlements of small, medium or unlimited extent.
The shell of this unit is the formal container that is used universally to store and transfer commodities. The starting point of the project was not just to design a basic unit of inhabitation -despite the fact that this constitutes a temporary accommodation- but to design a complete and functional accommodation.
This unit is repeated in space in various arrangements, according to the special geographic features of each area, creating in this way several centers of inhabitation. The repetition of these centers creates a settlement, the repetition of the settlement creates a community and the repetition of the community creates a city.
The structure and size of this unit are the ideal parameters to rapidly create settlements of a low budget that can provide comfortable living conditions. With the appropriate design, these units can also be used to house several services. This fact enforces the idea of permanent residence in the settlement.
In this way, despite the fact that the original intention of the project was to create temporary units of inhabitation, during the design a main question arises: whether it would be possible to use such a settlement to accommodate populations permanently or only temporarily.
The fact that containers can be transferred and placed rapidly, gives us the opportunity to create a city in a few days, and in addition, to create movable cities that can be transferred from one place to another.
In this occasion we have to view cities in a different way to the one we used to: not only as an amount of fixed, stable and unchangeable elements, but as a living organism that is transformed through time and that is affected by several elements from its external and internal environment.