Humanitarian “shelter” efforts are in history’s worst company

Upon a recent visit to the museum housed in Oscar Schindler’s long-gone factory in Kraków, Poland, I visited a reconstructed Jewish ghetto home. As we wandered through this historicized space, the tour guide explained, “The Nazis hired sociologists to determine the exact minimum space needed to survive, and they allocated three to four square meters per person.” I couldn’t help but think, “I’ve heard that figure somewhere before.”
By the time I had completed the museum tour, the connection had clicked for me: 3.5 square meters per person is the SPHERE minimum standard for covered shelter. Put another way, when today’s humanitarian actors are planning for the minimum amount of covered shelter that each refugee or displaced person requires due to conflict or natural disaster, the minimum is 3.5 square meters per person. In an opinion piece “The History of Three Point Five Square Meters,” Jim Kennedy and Charles Parrack helpfully traced the history of numeric standards for shelter to the 1970s and provide a summary of their evolution over the past four decades.
But let’s look further back. If we extend our historical arc further backward than the 1970s, we find the SPHERE standards to be shockingly in line with some regulations set by Nazis and Stalinists. The smallest amount of research, for example, has taught me that my Schindler Factory tour guide was more or less accurate. Some horrifying examples:
At the Riga ghetto in Latvia, the Nazis first allocated six square meters per inhabitant, which was later reduced to four square meters. The document that lays out the four square meters was called “Regulations for the Treatment of the Jews in Latvia.” I find it extraordinary that both of these figures remain higher than the SPHERE minimum standard.
In the Białystok ghetto in Poland, the Nazis operated on a “principle” of “three square meters per person” to allocate living quarters.
Within Stalin’s Siberian gulags, “each person received four meters of living space with a maximum of twenty square meters per family.” Although I am relieved that the SPHERE standards do not provide the family-level cap that Stalin did in Siberia, I nonetheless find it alarming that Stalin’s gulags started with a plan that allocated more square footage per person than the SPHERE standards currently require.
I have found examples of Nazi allocation regulations that are lower than the SPHERE standards: when creating the Minsk ghetto, the principle was 1.5 square meters per person. Likewise, in Pruzana, Poland, the calculation was two square meters per person. Nonetheless, there are several examples, as noted above, in which the SPHERE standards find themselves in particularly bad company.
It should go without saying that I am not suggesting that the SPHERE standards are based upon Nazi principles, nor am I saying that humanitarian aid workers are Nazis. On the contrary, the SPHERE principles are rooted in an attempt to set minimum standards that ensure human dignity in times of crisis and displacement. I am a humanitarian aid worker and know that nearly all representatives of our sector are acting in good faith in an attempt to protect some of the world’s most vulnerable people. But if we look to the past, we find that the 3.5 square meters find themselves eerily align with earlier standards and regulations set by regimes that sought the exact opposite: the Nazis and the Stalinists were trying to make life miserable and unlivable for the Jews. In some instances, they landed on the same square footage requirements — or even higher ones — than those we use today.
Is it not, then, time for a radical rethink in our shelter allocation requirements? History, common sense, and common decency all provide us with a resounding yes.
