Between April and May 2024, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul faced the most significant climate disaster in its history, marking one of the most severe hydrological events ever recorded in the country. Heavy and prolonged rains inundated entire cities and neighborhoods, destroyed crops and livestock, and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents—many of whom were Venezuelan migrants, who had previously arrived through Operação Acolhida (Operation Welcome) in the northern state of Roraima and were undergoing internal relocation to southern Brazil.1 In the immediate aftermath of the floods, schools, gymnasiums, and churches across the metropolitan area of the capital, Porto Alegre, were abruptly converted into emergency shelters. Soon, the first Humanitarian Reception Centers (Centros Humanitários de Acolhimento, or CHAs) were built to better accommodate the population. Originally referred to as provisional cities, they were later replaced with new temporary housing solutions. In turn, public buildings, prefabricated shelter units, and containers became spaces of collective waiting for nearly 80,000 people who faced issues with sanitation, privacy, safety, and psychological distress.2
What initially appeared as a short-term emergency response evolved into a more complex and protracted process, whereby displacement was managed with a succession of temporary spatial forms. These actions were part of the so-called Rio Grande Plan, an initiative of the Rio Grande do Sul state government to “face the social, economic, and environmental consequences of the extreme climate events that occurred in 2023 and 2024,” spanning emergency activities (short-term), reconstruction (mid-term), and future-oriented resilience (long-term).3 In practice, families that had lost their homes to the floods were successively moved from improvised public shelters to more organized living arrangements, such as prefabricated shelter models and containers, all still marked by uncertainty regarding permanence, ownership, and long-term urban (re)integration. Durable yet fragmented, these protection infrastructures extend the emergency across time without ever fulfilling the idea of home or offering a true sense of repair, ultimately reaffirming their own impermanence. In this context, the emergency merely changed its material appearance as different shelter modalities remained politically framed as temporary steps toward reconstruction and resilience. This movement, however, was not made without resistance. Local movements began protesting for rights and pushing back against solutions that treated displacement as only a matter of shelter provision.
Rio Grande do Sul can therefore be understood within a broader context of emergence, circulation, and adaptation of a “global shelter imaginary,” in which political dispossession (in an ever-growing range of forms) is reframed as an issue to be addressed through the technical, provisional fixes of better sheltering.4 This requires tracing how contemporary humanitarianism came to rely on sheltering practices designed for both immediate protection and prolonged use, shaped by the twin imperatives of standardization and local adaptation. This global trend takes on specific shape in Rio Grande do Sul, as the shifting temporalities of climate emergency and the unequal precarity of housing conditions pose new questions (and ways of resistance) for the global solutions brought in by the field of humanitarianism.
The Humanitarian Management of Permanent Emergencies
If emergency has increasingly become a permanent condition of governance, shelter occupies a particularly revealing position within this transformation. Designed to provide immediate protection while anticipating prolonged occupation, shelters operate within an unstable temporal horizon in which crises are expected to last indefinitely, while permanence remains politically unacceptable. They must respond to duration without producing the rights, infrastructures, and territorial claims associated with permanent dwelling. Balancing on this edge, they must function effectively without appearing too permanent, as a structure that looks overly durable threatens to codify the emergency into a visible marker of institutional failure and spatial disorder, exposing authorities to an accountability they actively seek to avoid.
This ambiguity traces back to a shift in humanitarianism itself. For much of the twentieth century, humanitarian actors discursively and operationally decoupled emergency relief from long-term political or development agendas, intervening only where life was imminently at risk.5 Over the course of the 1990s, however, the boundary between short-term relief and protracted development became increasingly blurred as new international organizations, state agencies, private actors, and technical experts entered the field. As the humanitarian ecosystem expanded, recurring coordination failures and legitimacy crises prompted a deeper institutionalization of the sector, displacing informal practices with standardized procedures, metrics, and codified systems of management. As a result, a logistical rationale formed a model of supply-chain humanitarianism that relies on standardized procurement systems and fragmented production networks to optimize efficiency and global circulation.6
This rationality translated human spatial needs into a universal and measurable minimum of 3.5 square meters per person.7 Emerging from a 1971 World Health Organization guide, this figure was codified in the 1998 draft of the Sphere project—the primary reference for humanitarian standards—as its only numerical indicator of shelter. Modeled in part on the idea of medical prescription, such metrics serve as an essential administrative protocol for safeguarding basic dignity and sanitary standards. Yet by treating shelter as a quantifiable dosage of survival, they render space into something that can be calculated, distributed, and monitored.8 While later editions of Sphere have tried to temper this rigidity by emphasizing qualitative criteria, incremental recovery, and local adaptation, the numeric indicator has merely been pushed further down the page, enduring in practice as an operational fixture.
Within this context, shelter ceases to be understood primarily as a situated practice of dwelling, but instead as a portable logistical object optimized for rapid assembly and scalability. What disappears is not the inhabitant’s vulnerability, which humanitarianism is prepared to recognize and address, but the political content of their claim to housing, permanence, and repair. The displaced person is therefore approached less as a political subject than as a body to be protected through basic provisions, consolidating a jargon of care organized around forms of rightless relief that allows temporary arrangements to persist at the cost of long-lasting precarity.9
Even as recent policy discussions call for a systemic reset of the humanitarian sector to refocus on acute emergencies and optimize resource allocation, the distinction between immediate relief and long-term development remains fragmented.10 This is especially the case when humanitarianism arrives to manage the impacts of climate change, which today are “one of the main drivers of humanitarian needs alongside conflicts.”11 This discursive move, which subsumes climate crisis under the humanitarian mandate, is associated with a practical consolidation of the presence of (international and national) humanitarian workers in post-disaster sites—an expansion in potential fields of activity that sits uneasily with a context of global humanitarian budget cuts and efforts to “hyper-prioritize” aid.12 Responses to these disaster contexts are similarly designed with a temporal horizon that balances the institutional promise of provisionality and the increasing recurrence and duration of states of emergency.
Nowhere is this overlap more visible than in the shelter sector in Brazil. Drawing on practices used in previous disasters, the Humanitarian Reception Centers (CHAs) built following the 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul were presented as an innovative intermediate solution between emergency shelter and reconstruction-stage housing. Distinct from the collective dormitories hurriedly set up in schools and sports gymnasiums during the initial inundation, some of these centers provided an integrated infrastructure of partitioned family rooms, communal spaces, and basic public services. A key component of this architecture was the Relief Housing Unit, a modular shelter system developed by the NGO Better Shelter. First introduced in 2013 and widely deployed across Latin America, including in Operação Acolhida, roughly 300 of these units were donated to the government of Rio Grande do Sul by UNHCR and assembled in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Brazilian military forces. Although designed for short-term occupations of four to six weeks, the Reception Centers remained operational for nearly a year, completing decommissioning only in mid-2025.
The capacity of these standardized modular units to circulate captures the global logistical imaginary of contemporary humanitarianism. Moreover, they map out the shifting modalities of provisionality that define contemporary humanitarian response policies in Brazil. Their modularity and portability allow the same infrastructural package to travel across distinct regimes of displacement, as units were physically transferred from international networks in Colombia and Operação Acolhida in Roraima to the climate emergency in Rio Grande do Sul. In the CHAs, displaced populations (including Venezuelan immigrants and refugees) who had undergone internal relocation across Brazilian territory encountered the exact same modular objects and logistical networks they had left behind in the Brazilian North. By moving fluidly from cross-border displacement and refugee reception to climate disaster response, these standardized units demonstrate that humanitarian sheltering practices operate less as a progressive step toward permanent dwelling than as a mobile device for organizing indefinite provisionality.
As the centers were gradually dismantled, remaining families were transferred to another provisional typology: Transportable Housing Modules. These 27-square-meter structures, fabricated from steel containers and concrete and equipped with basic appliances, were paired with temporary financial stipends from IOM to assist with immediate food and transport costs. In an official governmental video showcasing “triumph stories” of those who were helped after the floods, a woman states:
I was in the shelter [a Humanitarian Reception Center] for six months. They registered the people who were there. Then it was communicated that we were moving here [to a Transportable Housing Module], at a meeting, and we came.… When I entered this house, I was very happy, as I had a space of my own.
At these temporary houses, families were supposed to wait for the construction of (standardized, 44-square-meter) permanent houses in the most affected cities, though many remain unbuilt or undelivered to this day. This very succession of spatial forms reveals how emergency management operates by substituting one temporary infrastructure with another, increasing material durability while maintaining the political designation of provisionality without producing any sense of permanence or repair. These progressively resilient structures extend the horizon of waiting, institutionalizing a condition of permanent transience under the guise of structured care. Far from being temporary, they persist over time by continually shifting their form or location, thereby prolonging the emergency through endless mobility.
Designing Global Shelters for Local Emergencies
In the prevailing global shelter imaginary, political dispossession is reframed as a problem of shelter provision.13 Forced displacement, climate change, and poverty are increasingly addressed through the lenses of design, logistics, and spatial management. In this imaginary, shelter is presented as the natural answer to crises whose causes lie beyond housing itself. It reorganizes the political problem of dispossession. In doing so, it narrows the field of possible responses. Instead of foregrounding rights, infrastructure, or long-term urban integration, humanitarian aid becomes centered on the production and maintenance of temporary spatial forms to contain displaced populations. This does not mean that shelters are irrelevant or that the need for immediate protection is secondary. Rather, the problem lies in the way sheltering practices come to stand in for political resolution.
The contemporary fixation with shelter innovation, in this sense, must be understood alongside the logistical transformation of humanitarian governance. Earlier experiments in prefabrication and mass housing, especially in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, had already linked emergency, standardization, and industrial building systems. Figures such as Le Corbusier explored modularity and prefabrication as responses to mass housing needs, while Alvar Aalto developed temporary housing concepts for displaced populations.14 By the 1970s, international relief agencies were receiving countless standardized shelter proposals by architects and designers from the Global North.15 Many of these projects remained embedded in universalizing assumptions that treated post-disaster sites as blank slates detached from local geographies, climatic conditions, building cultures, and social practices.16 Their success depended not on permanence, but on mobility, as the ideal shelter could be stored, transported, assembled, dismantled, replicated, and exhibited anywhere.
Against this universalist paradigm, alternative architectural imaginaries emerged. Practitioners associated with tropical architecture, self-help housing, and disaster planning challenged the idea that shelter should be reduced to a disposable emergency building/object. Rather than treating shelter as a finished product to be delivered from outside, they advocated systems-thinking approaches and grassroots self-help methodologies that understood shelter as an evolutionary process.17 In this view, post-disaster housing should not remain frozen in its emergency form, but should provide an initial framework that affected populations can adapt, expand, and transform over time, including against future hazards and recurring climatic events. The difference between these approaches is therefore also temporal, insofar as tropical architecture initiatives sought to collapse the divide between emergency and development by allowing temporary structures to evolve into stable forms of dwelling or post-development afterlives, rather than replacing structures along the response chain.
The contemporary humanitarian sector has absorbed elements of both approaches without addressing their contradiction. New shelter models have become resilient objects because displacement crises increasingly exceed the short timelines imagined by classical emergency response. At the same time, humanitarian governance remains institutionally dependent on maintaining the political fiction of temporariness.18 In Rio Grande do Sul, this intermediary logic extended beyond the shelter unit itself. It structured a broader sequence of responses that moved displaced families from improvised public shelters to Reception Centers, from Reception Centers to Transportable Modules, and from there toward social housing programs whose final units have still not been fully delivered. Even if they have, however, this promised endpoint cannot be equated with repair or resolution in any simple sense, since newly built houses do not necessarily restore previous homes, territories, attachments, or forms of livelihood. What matters, then, is not only the limited lifespan of a specific model but the political order and the practices that (re)organize different shelter forms along a provisional trajectory.
Reimagining Crisis Response
Given the unprecedented scale of the floods, the response in Rio Grande do Sul also functioned as an institutional laboratory for testing new operational layouts, consolidating bureaucratic lessons, and expanding the roles of national and international humanitarian organizations alongside military forces. Through this localized experimentation, globally circulating practices of crisis management became further entrenched within Brazilian civil defense policies, framing displacement as a technical problem of shelter provision rather than a matter of political rights.19 Yet this dominant institutional imaginary has not gone unchallenged, as grassroots mobilization has begun to contest the very terms of the response by shifting the debate back to political recognition.
A key actor in this regard has been the Movement of People Affected by Dams (Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, MAB). Created in the 1980s, this grassroots Brazilian movement initially gathered populations affected by hydroelectric plants and, more recently, has mobilized in a wider range of disaster contexts. In 2024, MAB distributed meals and other donations in Porto Alegre. Beyond material assistance, they offered a space for political organization of local communities, supporting the emergence of local leadership that could autonomously demand their rights to housing and other policies. In a 2026 report, MAB retells this story, arguing that the extreme events caused by the climate crisis were in fact giving rise to “a new affected subject,” a “political subject that no longer accepts being a victim and decides to be a protagonist in the search for basic rights amidst the chaos of emergency.”20 The movement lists the claims of the affected: (1) their recognition as subjects of rights, with the inclusion of all those who have lost their houses to the floods in the problematic, untransparent lists of citizens entitled to reconstruction policies; (2) reparation policies for the damage suffered; (3) and the implementation of permanent preventive policies and plans for extreme climate events, prioritizing the most vulnerable populations.21
The latter point reminds us that disasters cannot be grasped as mere natural (and thus, unavoidable) events; they are shaped by social, historical, and political processes that produce and unequally distribute risks. According to data from the OAS Special Rapporteur of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, most affected neighborhoods in Rio Grande do Sul were those historically marginalized and inhabited by class and racial minorities.22 One cannot properly address the impacts of these disasters without accounting for how they are shaped by political decisions that far exceed the realm of emergencies. That is, beyond sheltering, one must discuss housing and development policies.
Two years later, in July 2026, Rio Grande do Sul once again became afflicted by floods that displaced hundreds of people from their homes. With authorities anticipating even graver scenarios amid the expected intensification of El Niño through 2027, the region faces a chronic cycle of climate shock that continues to test the limits of provisional governance. MAB is again monitoring their situation and advocating for proper housing solutions. As an affected woman says in a social media post, some people remain “in the containers.”23 Others have been moved to the “social rent program,” a direct financial subsidy that allows families to lease private accommodation of their choice. Although this support was extended for another year following new floods, it leaves families with no structural prospects beyond that period. In another post, a MAB representative is shown speaking at a public audience at Rio Grande do Sul’s legislative house, referring to the collective shelters that were once again being set up: “We need to know where to go. Will they place women again in danger? Children in danger, sleeping precariously on the floor, with a single bathroom for everyone?”24 In the audience, MAB called for the expansion of a program called “Assisted Buying,” through which some had finally received funding to buy a house and are, thus, “now watching the rain from their windows.” Yet there are still many who continue to be left off the official lists of affected people, and thus continue to rely on temporary shelters and solutions.25
Through their various practices of mobilization—from protests to meetings with decision-makers, and from stitching arpilleras to providing material aid—MAB troubles a conception of crisis response where, in the words of Didier Fassin, “inequality is replaced by exclusion, domination is transformed into misfortune, injustice is articulated by suffering, violence is expressed in terms of trauma.”26 It challenges the global shelter imaginary that replaces political recognition and rights protection with technocratic fixes, treating displacement (stemming from wars, climate emergencies, or any other sources) as a problem of (temporary) housing.27 And it cuts across distinctions between humanitarianism and development, drawing connections between different contexts of struggle.28
Finally, by framing the affected as a political subject, the movement fosters effective participation as an avenue to address the long-standing disconnect between local needs and the structural inequalities that shape emergencies on the one hand, and a set of standardized solutions that shift the burden of adaptation and resilience onto the affected populations on the other. In a world in which humanitarian response has come to be grounded in innovative design of solutions that aim to seamlessly circulate across the globe, repertoires of contestation circulating across different types of “emergency,” like those employed by MAB, shed light on how the politics of dwelling cuts across ordinary and exceptional times.
“Emergências: Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil,” UNHCR Brazil, ➝; Agência Nacional de Águas e Saneamento Básico (ANA), As enchentes no Rio Grande do Sul: lições, desafios e caminhos para um futuro resiliente (Brasília: ANA, 2025).
Antonio Paulo Cargnin et al., “Centros humanitários de acolhimento como inovação institucional na gestão de desastres: A experiência do Rio Grande do Sul pós-enchentes de 2024,” Estudos e Planejamento, no. 28 (2026), ➝.
Governo do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, Plano Rio Grande: Todos Nós por Todos Nós (Porto Alegre: Comitê Executivo do Plano Rio Grande, 2025), ➝.
Andrew Herscher and Daniel Bertrand Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Craig Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)Order,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, ed. Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism Transformed,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 4 (2005): 723–40.
Elisa Pascucci, “Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World: Designing Goods for Supply-Chain Humanitarianism,” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2021): 260–78; Rafeef Ziadah, “Circulating Power: Humanitarian Logistics, Militarism, and the United Arab Emirates,” Antipode 51, no. 5 (2019): 1684–1702.
Jim Kennedy and Charles Parrack, “The History of Three Point Five Square Metres,” in Shelter Projects 2011–2012, ed. Joseph Ashmore (Geneva: IFRC and UNHCR, 2013).
Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2006).
Jenny Edkins, “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 25, no. 1 (2000): 3–25.
“Humanitarian Reset,” Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2024, ➝.
“Climate Change,” OCHA, ➝.
“UN and Partners Unveil Hyper-Prioritized Aid Appeal Amid Cruel Math of Brutal Funding Cuts,” OCHA, 2025, ➝.
Herscher and Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary.
Tom Scott-Smith, “Modernism and Technology in Humanitarian Action,” in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism, ed. Katharyne Mitchell and Polly Pallister-Wilkins (London: Routledge, 2023).
Tania Messell and Lilian Sanchez Moreno, “Disaster Relief and the Materiality of Aid: Humanitarian Imaginaries and Design Interventions at Oxfam, 1971–1976,” in Building-Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2022), 181–98.
Messell and Sanchez Moreno, “Disaster Relief and the Materiality of Aid.”
Tania Messell, “Resilience by Design: Emergency Architecture, Testing and the Ecology of Aid, 1970–1980,” Third World Quarterly 47 (2026); Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Architecture Culture, Humanitarian Expertise,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 3 (2017): 367–84.
Herscher and Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary.
See, for instance, Brazil, Ministério do Desenvolvimento e Assistência Social, Família e Combate à Fome, Gestão e funcionamento de abrigos provisórios no SUAS (Brasília: MDS, 2025), ➝.
Victória Holzbach / MAB, “MAB publica balanço de dois anos da enchente no RS e cobra por reparação aos atingidos,” MAB, July 5, 2026, ➝; MAB, Balanço do MAB: dois anos da enchente no Rio Grande do Sul – organização e luta pelos direitos dos atingidos (Porto Alegre: MAB, 2026).
MAB, Balanço do MAB.
“Relatório da visita da REDESCA ao Brasil – Impactos das enchentes no Rio Grande Do Sul – Observações e recomendações para a garantia dos direitos econômicos, sociais, culturais e ambientais, Organization of American States, 2025, ➝.
MAB – Região Sul (@mabregiaosul), “Durante a semana do clima, entidades parceiras foram aos territórios atingidos para dar voz para as famílias,” Instagram reel, July 27, 2026, ➝.
MAB – Região Sul (@mabregiaosul), “Despreparo do governo do RS,” Instagram reel, July 16, 2026, ➝.
MAB – Região Sul (@mabregiaosul), “Despreparo do governo do RS.”
MAB, “Atingidas do Rio Grande do Sul abrem jornada de lutas com exposição arpilleras: Bordando a resistência,” March 7, 2024, ➝; Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 7–8.
Herscher and Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary.
This can be seen in the decision to launch the International Movement of the Affected by Dams, Socio-environmental Crimes, and Climate Crisis during COP 30 in 2025, thereby connecting extreme climate events, dam disasters, and others as contexts between which forms of contestation can travel. “IV Encontro Internacional de Atingidos,” MAB, April 10, 2026, ➝.
