Facing the elements: how humanity shelters

Old photograph of two tents and a few people on a plain where patches of snow remain. — Copper Inuit camp at Lake Tahiryuak, on Victoria Island (now in Nunavut), in May 1915: on the left an Inuit skin tent, on the right the canvas tent of Diamond Jenness, who took the photograph. Diamond Jenness, CC BY-SA 4.0, source

The igloo is not the home of the Inuit. It is a winter shelter, built in a single region of the Arctic, by a people who have several other kinds.

The world’s best-known image of a dwelling is wrong on three counts.

The illusion of the single image

The igloo often appears in books with this caption: here is the home of the Inuit.

First error: it is a winter shelter, and often a hunting shelter. In summer, people live in skin tents and, over the last few decades, in canvas tents.
Second error: the snow house is not built throughout the Arctic. It is built in one specific region, between the Mackenzie delta and Labrador. Elsewhere, people build differently.
Third error: a single society does not have just one house; it has several. Among the Inuit, there is also the qarmaq (an autumn house with walls of stone, turf and whale bone, roofed with skins) and the tupiq (a portable tent).¹

The igloo exists, it is very effective, and building one requires real skill: it requires dense, wind-packed snow, cut with a knife into large blocks laid in a spiral.²

But a single image cannot represent a people. Rather than drawing up a catalogue of the world’s houses, we will take the problems one by one.

What a shelter does

A shelter maintains, inside, conditions that the outside does not provide. It contends with four constraints, and every society solves these four problems with whatever it has to hand.

Temperature. A thick wall does not block heat; it delays it: it absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, which evens out temperature swings. Builders call this thermal inertia, not to be confused with insulation: the first shifts heat in time, the second prevents it from passing through. A stone wall has a great deal of inertia and insulates poorly. This is why earth or stone houses in hot regions have massive walls and few openings. Elsewhere, the aim is instead to insulate — to trap still air in a wall, because air that does not circulate is an excellent insulator. Packed snow, straw, wool and foam all work on this principle.
Water. Rain must be drained away before it gets in. Hence the shape of roofs: the more it rains or snows, the steeper they are. A flat roof appears only where there is little rain.
Wind. It chills, erodes and tears away. It is countered by shape — rounded rather than angular — or by orientation.
Intruders. Animals, insects, sometimes other humans. This explains houses on stilts, narrow entrances and enclosures.

Materials are almost never chosen for their beauty: they are chosen because they are there. Raw earth is among the most widely used materials in all of human history, and a significant share of the world’s population still lives in earth buildings today. People build in wood where there are trees, in stone where there is rock, in snow where there is nothing else.

A house is therefore first and foremost a response to a place. This is what makes the idea of a “typical house” for a given people absurd — the same community may have several shelters, differing according to season and use.

1. Protecting against heat

A first example: a town in the Australian desert, Coober Pedy.

It is a mining town born of the discovery of opal deposits, in a desert where, in summer, the temperature can reach 52 °C.³

To escape it, a large proportion of the inhabitants live underground, in houses dug into the soft rock. Inside, the temperature stays moderate and stable all year round, without air conditioning or heating. There are also underground churches, hotels and shops.⁴

These are not people of the past, nor an isolated people, but twentieth-century miners who used their tools to dig their way out of the heat.

Physical principle
The mass of earth above the dwelling evens out temperature swings. It is a universal phenomenon found in Cappadocia (Turkey), in southern Tunisia, in northern China and in the cave dwellings of the Loire hillsides.
Same problem, same solution: it is not a matter of culture, it is a matter of physics.

2. Protecting against water

When the water rises, the structure is raised on piles: these are stilts.

They are often wrongly seen as something distant and exotic. Around the Alps, people built on stilts for millennia: more than a hundred of these sites, in Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria and Slovenia, are now jointly inscribed as World Heritage.⁵

Another context, another reason: in Benin, the lake city of Ganvié is built on water. The Tofinu people took refuge there at the time of the slave trade, to escape the soldiers who were hunting them: the soldiers feared the lake, where, they believed, a demon lived. Ganvié is not a picturesque village: it is a refuge city.⁶

The same reversal holds elsewhere. The rice terraces of the Philippines, long presented as two thousand years old, are apparently much more recent according to excavations: they were reportedly built in reaction to the Spanish conquest, by populations retreating to the highlands. A landscape thought to be ancestral is often the trace of a threat.⁷

These structures demand constant maintenance: wooden stilts must be replaced regularly as they rot. The same goes for the great earthen mosque of Djenné (Mali), replastered every year: what endures over time endures only because it is repaired.⁸

3. Moving around

Some dwellings are designed to be taken down and transported. The way of life associated with them — nomadism — is often misunderstood.

Notion	Definition
Nomadism	Cyclical, regular movements between known and organised points along a route.
Migration	Linear, permanent movement from a point A to a point B with no planned return.

In Africa, herders’ transhumance rests on agreements negotiated with farmers: the herds graze on crop residues and fertilise the fields in return. This is a well-established system, not spontaneous wandering.⁹

In the twentieth century, many states sought to settle these populations. In Inner Asia, many herding households move less than they used to; but where the collective farms changed earlier practices least, as in Mongolia, the mobility of certain types of herds was kept, or even enhanced.¹⁰

4. Living together

How many people make up a household? The answer depends heavily on the region of the world.

The most widespread arrangement worldwide is not the household of parents and children alone, but the extended family — the one that brings grandparents, uncles and cousins together under one roof.¹¹

The differences between regions are enormous. Nearly half of the inhabitants of the Asia-Pacific region live in extended families, compared with one in ten in North America. The average household size ranges from 6.9 people in sub-Saharan Africa to 3.1 in Europe, and 3.3 in North America.¹²

It is not only a matter of taste: it is also about pooling incomes, sharing out tasks, looking after children and elders. A survey covering a hundred and thirty countries also observes that the richer a country is, the smaller its households.¹³

5. Who builds?

Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first woman architect, spent many years designing towers of steel and glass. Then she changed course and developed what she calls “barefoot architecture”:

raised shelters of earth, lime and bamboo, very cheap and flood-resistant;
building techniques passed on directly to the inhabitants, so that they build for themselves;
raised, smokeless cooking stoves, which spare women’s lungs and protect children from burns.¹⁴

In 2023 she received the Royal Gold Medal, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects: one of the highest distinctions in the world for an architect.¹⁵

6. Here, today

Access to decent housing remains a challenge throughout the world today, including in developed countries.

In France, the Fondation pour le logement des défavorisés — formerly the Fondation Abbé Pierre — publishes an annual report on the situation. It shows that the number of homeless people has risen sharply in a little over ten years, and that far more people still have no home of their own: on the street, in squats, in emergency accommodation or staying with others.¹⁶

These figures are updated every year. It is better to consult them, with their date, in the most recent report than to rely on figures that a page such as this one might have copied.

Note 1

igloo, temporary winter home or hunting-ground dwelling of Canadian and Greenland Inuit (Eskimos).

Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Igloo”

The igloo, usually made from blocks of snow and dome-shaped, is used only in the area between the Mackenzie River delta and Labrador

Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Igloo”

There are two types of transitional season houses, or qarmat, that Inuit inhabited in the autumn. A common form of qarmaq was a semi-permanent, small structure made from walls of stone, turf, whale bones, a stone platform, and skin roof (p. 52).

Simon Fraser University, Inuit Housing: A Survey of the Literature, “Eskimo Architecture: Dwelling and Structure in the Early Historic Period” (résumé de Lee, Molly et Reinhardt, Gregory A., Eskimo Architecture: Dwelling and Structure in the Early Historic Period, University of Alaska Press, 2003)

une simple tente, appelée tupiq (au pluriel tupiit) […] Le tupiq est la parfaite structure portable pour ces activités.

a simple tent, called a tupiq (plural tupiit) […] The tupiq is the perfect portable structure for these activities.

Mills, Edward and Kalman, Harold D., mis à jour par Filice, Michelle, “Tupiq”, L’Encyclopédie canadienne, Historica Canada, 30 April 2020