Putting people at the centre of reconstruction

Theo Schilderman

This introductory chapter makes a case for people-centred reconstruction. It rejects previous dominant approaches to reconstruction, such as donor-driven reconstruction, as being inappropriate, and owner-driven reconstruction as being too exclusive. It argues that, in order to create greater resilience and sustainability, reconstruction must be more participatory and learn from development theory and practice, particularly in the housing sector. Above all, reconstruction needs to adopt a more holistic approach, combining the rebuilding of houses with that of livelihoods and local markets. Practical experience and guidance on this is still scarce, but being developed.

People-centred reconstruction in context

Approximately forty years ago, major earthquakes struck Peru and Turkey, causing much damage and many casualties. In both cases, the government initiated large reconstruction programmes, often involving relocation, and received assistance from external humanitarian agencies on an unprecedented scale. In 1970, there was little previous reconstruction experience of similar magnitude to learn from. The approaches followed by governments and agencies alike were to build houses for people rather than with them. Evaluations of those programmes by, for example, Blaikie et al., (1994) and Aysan and Oliver (1987) have since highlighted that they often got it wrong, and many of the houses built remained unoccupied, whilst the affected people reverted to their old ways of building and remained vulnerable to future risks.

Tragically, forty years on, governments and agencies sometimes still get their reconstruction approaches wrong. It perhaps happens less frequently and not to the same extent, but it still does happen and houses sometimes remain unoccupied even now. Disasters do put a lot of pressure on decision makers; they lead to thousands of households living in makeshift accommodation or with host families, and nobody likes this to last for too long. Besides, if nothing happens quickly, the media will put on additional pressure. So now, as in 1970, decisions are frequently made in a hurry, without much investigation or analysis, and without involving all those that matter. It appears to remain difficult for some decision makers to shift from a supply-driven 'relief mode' to a 'reconstruction mode' that ought to be more support-driven and people centred.

A recent step in the right direction has been the emergence of transitional housing which allows affected households to move out of their tents and other emergency shelters relatively quickly, whilst buying some time to get the permanent housing right – however, it comes at a cost. It was applied quite widely after the tsunami that affected many Asian countries in late 2004. A recent evaluation of a transitional housing programme in Aceh by van Dijk (2009) shows that transitional housing did also have a positive socio-economic impact on the people affected, provided they did not stay in the housing for too long.

For most households, a house is the biggest asset they will possess in their lifetime. They often struggle to construct it according to their individual needs and capacities, and the process may involve years of incremental development. Once a disaster has destroyed that asset, they may need outside assistance to reconstruct it non-incrementally, but the house still will have to meet their needs, which is one of the key reasons for putting people at the centre of reconstruction.

Reconstruction does not take place in a vacuum, but in a context of pre-disaster developments which have influenced the policies, strategies, rules and customs that are in place. These may differ from country to country or even within countries, but they are what have shaped society, livelihoods, housing, services and much more, as well as given rise to poverty, vulnerability and exclusion. It is important to analyse and understand these to achieve the most appropriate reconstruction, but in post-disaster pressure, there is often a tendency to only do so superficially, if at all. If people-centred reconstruction is to succeed, it needs to consider at least four sets of questions wherever it is applied:

1. What can we learn from the housing sector? How is housing provided in non-disaster circumstances, and who are the key actors? How in particular do low-income and marginalized people build or acquire housing? What are the prevailing government policies, strategies and rules applying to housing, and do these hinder or enable housing by or for the low-income? Which elements of this could be particularly useful in reconstruction? And what are the inherent weaknesses or risks?

2. Are people normally put at the centre of development? Is there a tradition of popular participation in the planning, implementation and evaluation of development? Is this supported by law or official policies or does it happen on an ad hoc basis? How inclusive is it? And how widely has it been applied to housing and its related services?

3. Is people's vulnerability considered in development thinking? What are its underlying causes? What are people's strengths (e.g. indigenous knowledge or social capital) and how can these be used to reduce their vulnerability? And what are their weaknesses, and how can these be overcome? Is there a general awareness amongst all stakeholders that poor housing may merely be symptomatic of problems such as poverty or lack of education, which may need to be tackled more holistically to build back better and in a sustainable way? How much experience is there with integrated development planning?

4. What are the lessons from previous reconstruction projects or programmes in the country, in its region, or elsewhere? Are these being retained by the agencies involved? And have they been captured in policies, strategies, rules or guidelines?

The investigation and analysis of the above four sets of questions do not have to happen after a disaster has struck. In fact, they could happen at any time, as part of a disaster preparedness strategy. Their study could involve staff and students of local universities, NGOs and authorities supporting disaster risk reduction, and others, and it would be equally important to involve communities at risk. Doing some of this work now will reduce some of the pressure immediately after a disaster.

Learning from the housing sector

As early as 1980, Kreimer pointed out that 'disasters are not isolated factors in creating housing shortages and substandard conditions. A number of continuities and similarities exist between 'normal' and post-disaster shelter development which need to be considered in the future planning and implementation of housing programmes' (1980: 282). She mentions the vulnerability of people living in informal housing, caused by a lack of resources and opportunities. Whilst she does recognize that people affected by a disaster face critical problems that need special attention, she also is of the opinion that post-disaster housing is not sufficiently different from 'normal' housing to warrant the distinct reconstruction approaches by aid and housing agencies. In fact, she thinks that disasters generate opportunities, due to the influx of resources, to tackle some of the weaknesses of low-income housing, such as access to land. Unfortunately, even to this day many agencies consider reconstruction to be quite different from 'normal' housing, and pay insufficient attention to how the housing sector functions in non-disaster times.

An analysis of housing in any particular country will probably have to distinguish formal from informal housing processes, and urban from rural locations, since there are important differences between how housing is built or acquired, as well as constraints and opportunities that come with those. For example, in towns and cities land for housing is often hard to come by and expensive, other housing resources will also have to be paid for; and various standards and regulations apply. In informal housing, the latter tend to be ignored, and construction is more often guided by traditional knowledge, and constrained by access to finance and markets. In the countryside, land is mostly less of a constraint, though there is a sizeable minority of landless rural people. Besides housing they can rely to an extent on resources available in the natural environment at no or low cost, such as timber, bamboo, thatch, stone and aggregates, and mutual aid is widespread too; as a result, rural housing usually requires less money. Rural housing tends to be informal, in that it does generally not adhere to standards or regulations, and is often not formally registered. The three predominant housing processes are summarized in table 1.1 below.

Formal urban housing processes

These processes can apply to a number of cases. They include the design and construction of individual houses, managed by the owners, as well as larger housing schemes, managed by a group of owners, e.g. organized in a housing cooperative. It also includes housing built for profit – either through sale or letting – by individuals or companies. The design and supervision of these dwellings often involves building professionals, and they are usually built by contractors.

By 1970, when the earthquakes (mentioned at the start of this chapter) struck Peru and Turkey, governments of many developing countries had become used to supplying urban housing in this way, in an attempt to reduce a growing housing gap caused by rapid urbanization. Hardly ever, did they manage to build houses in adequate numbers, nor were they able to reach the urban poor, unless the housing was heavily subsidized. Housing construction by the private sector helped to fill the gap at the top end of the market, but they were equally unable or unwilling to provide formal housing to the urban poor. Essentially, the per capita cost of this housing process was far too high. In the 1970s, access to land was not as big a constraint as it is to-date, but important bottlenecks, even then, were the high levels of standards and regulations, as well as lengthy and expensive procedures. As to the first, as early as 1978 a study by the World Bank of six cities found that 35–68 per cent of their residents were unable to afford the cheapest housing units produced by the public sector. And Saad Yahya et al. (2001:1) observed:

Less than half of the urban population in developing countries can afford to build according to the prevailing standards. Their lack of legal tenure makes them vulnerable to eviction and violence; it also severely limits their access to housing finance; both factors combine to make the poor less inclined and less able to improve the poor housing conditions that currently affect their health and productivity.

Of course, these same conditions also increase their vulnerability to disasters, as stated by Kreimer (1980). De Soto (1989: 134–143) is one of the authors who brought the constraints posed by housing procedures to our attention. Research in the 1980s in Peru, by his Instituto Libertad y Democracia found that it took 43 months, 207 bureaucratic steps and the equivalent of 56 monthly minimum salaries to legally acquire a piece of public wasteland, a further 28 months to get a permit to develop it, plus 12 months for a building permit. It was only then, after nearly 7 years, that construction could start. For De Soto, this was a key reason for people to invade land and build outside the law. The World Bank (1993: 24) also recognizes that 'nothing influences the efficiency and responsiveness of housing supply more than the legal and regulatory framework within which housing suppliers operate'. For evidence, they cite the same example of Peru, and a comparative study in South East Asia, which suggests that housing supply in Thailand, where regulation is simple and efficient, is more than 30 times as responsive to shifts in demand than in Korea or Malaysia, where regulation is more complicated. Similar issues in the areas of tenure and procedures also tend to make urban reconstruction a lot more challenging than rural reconstruction in many countries.

By the early 1970s, the limitations of public sector supply of housing were becoming evident. The emerging neo-liberal thinking also preferred leaving housing development to the private sector. In a shift of policy, major donors like the World Bank (1993: 52–53), thus encouraged governments to move towards sites and services programmes, supplying affordable land, infrastructure services and sometimes core houses to owners who then had to complete the housing process themselves. This made housing more affordable, attaining a medium per capita cost, but again there was little evidence that the urban poor were reached in large enough numbers. And if that did occur, pressure on them was high to sell their properties on to higher income groups. Whilst sites and services programmes did help to make serviced urban land available to some, they probably did not do enough to tackle the above cited problems of regulations and procedures adequately. As a result, some time in the 1980s, this approach started to decline.

From the late 1980s onwards, the role of governments in the provision of formal urban housing has been increasingly seen as that of an enabler or facilitator, as expressed in the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements' (UNCHS) Global Strategy for Shelter for the Year 2000 (1988), or in the terms of the World Bank as 'enabling markets to work' (1993). That role includes putting in place policies and strategies that encourage formal housing provision by the private sector, e.g. access to housing finance, the replacement of prescriptive by performance standards, and the simplification of compliance processes. The advantage to governments was that this could be achieved at the lowest per capita cost. This move also seemed to finally recognize what Turner and Fichter (1972) were saying nearly 20 years earlier, namely that where dwellers are in control, their homes are better and cheaper than those built through government programmes or large corporations. Donor agencies like the World Bank changed accordingly, in the case of the Bank, for instance, in supporting housing finance institutions, albeit mostly not in least developed countries (LDCs). Enablement is also at the core of the Habitat Agenda (UNCHS, 1997), agreed by the vast majority of countries and key international institutions in Istanbul in 1996.

Over time, therefore, formal urban housing processes have changed from being essentially 'supply driven' to being much more 'support driven', which does allow much greater accommodation of people-centred housing, or reconstruction for that matter, and should allow to achieve a much larger scale. It must be noted, though, that different countries have reached different stages in this process of change, and that changes may even be reversed, as in the case of India's social housing programme described in chapter seven of this volume by Barenstein and Iyengar.

It remains important, in each case, to assess what the key mechanisms are in current housing policies and strategies, and whether they are truly enabling or constraining, particularly to the poor. Recent reconstruction experience suggests, for instance in Pakistan after the recent Kashmir earthquake, that access to formal land and registration of titles are bottlenecks that affect urban reconstruction to a much larger extent than rural reconstruction. Similarly, there is always a delicate balance between making standards and regulations simpler and cheaper, and maintaining sufficient quality to resist future disasters.