Date of Submission
Spring 5-13-2026
Degree Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Architecture
Department
Architecture
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Ehsan Sheikholharam Mashhadi
Abstract
Haiti is not an anomaly; it is a case study. Since the 2010 earthquake, displacement has not resolved but compounded, layered beneath successive crises of political instability, gang violence, and natural disaster. As of 2025, 1.4 million people remain without homes, many of them inheriting a life between tents and concrete that was never meant to last this long. Yet responses remain trapped in the logic of emergency. To live between tents and concrete is to exist in suspended uncertainty where children grow up without an address and community forms despite the design, not because of it. These camps were never built for belonging. They ignore the Lakou, the traditional communal compound that has long organized Haitian domestic and social life, replacing culturally rooted space with rows of identical shelters that house bodies but not culture. Through historical and precedent research, including Berthelot’s Caribbean Popular Dwelling, Khudi Bari, and Elemental’s incremental housing models, alongside case study analysis of IDP camps in Haiti, this thesis investigates how vernacular architecture and indigenous spatial logic can inform permanent resettlement design. From this research a housing prototype was developed drawing from the Ti Kay form, with spatial diagrams informed by the Lakou typology organizing units into a collective, community-centered layout. Between Tents and Concrete: Rethinking Displacement Space in Haiti proposes that refugee settlements do not have to be spaces of pause. When designed with cultural intelligence and incremental permanence in mind, they can become platforms for full, self-determined lives where residents work, build, grow, and belong.