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Governments are now accepting the existence of environmental instability and yet still there exists conflicting opinions regarding the social impact of this climate change. Conflicts and geographic phenomena are creating unprecedented numbers of temporarily displaced people. William B. Wood, the official geographer of the US Department of State has stated:

Anti-immigrant rhetoric and apocalyptic forecasts of environmental disaster … may also be obfuscating a rational policy discussion … Indeed, focusing attention primarily on such a long-term and worldwide phenomenon could mask the more immediate reality of many dispersed and localised ecological crises and the fact that there is usually no simple relationship between environmental causes and societal effects.

Work in Diploma 7 2007 was stimulated by the question of political migration and tested through a 1:1 prototype house at Maela refugee camp on the Thai–Burma border.

This research is extended in 2008 to Burma’s neighbouring state Bangladesh and the Ganges delta. Home to 100 million people, it is the most densely packed human population on earth. Annual extremes range from near desert to cyclones and floods of the monsoon. Communities survive through tactical environmental migration. We have explored the philosophical, social, political and technical response to provision of long-term settlements working with a research group including technologists, theorists and NGOs responsible for live field projects and have applied the emergent strategy in response to their requirements.

Visiting Bangladesh in the aftermath of Cyclone Sidr, the year’s programme continued a development from component to rural and urban strategies. Investigating resolutions in increasing scale assembling a logical argument based on the critical evaluation of component-based systems.

Components
Organisational Network: Operating within extraordinary contexts depends on forming diffuse contact networking.
Social: Appropriate application of technology and energy. Development of implementation tactics though interview and interaction.
Environmental: Extended component systems behind energy, developed into a socio economic taxonomic structure.
Structural: Constructional strategies tested through extensive research and development
Economic: Human self interest, global ecology, sustainability and fair trade feature within the resolution of live projects
Application: Output from analysis will be a construction manual applied to production information used for manufacturing.
Material Systems: Development of a material system based on local technological context, knowledge transfer, renewable resources and hybridity.

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