Emergency Shelter Topologies: Locating Humanitarian Space in Mobile and Material Practice

Focusing on two different devices commonly deployed in emergency shelter responses, the emergency family tent and the shelter kit, this paper traces the topological associations of humanitarian spaces as enacted through humanitarian practice. The emergency family tent is shown to effect humanitarian space within the associations of a network topology by acting as an ‘immutable mobile’, connecting different places of humanitarian crises with each other through stabilising relationships between them across space and over time and ordering space according to a sequential timeline of action. In contrast, the shelter kit is shown to effect humanitarian space within the associations of a fluid topology by acting as a ‘mutable mobile’, connecting the sites of crisis not through stabilisation but through adapting to a wide variety of local contexts and conditions and ordering space according to an overlapping and partly simultaneous timeline of action. These different ‘shelter topologies’ are shown to convey different assumptions about, and underlie different topographic renderings of, humanitarian space.