Approaches, designs and socio-cultural implications of post-disaster housing: lessons from Aceh tsunami reconstruction

The number of small-medium disaster especially flood and cyclones has quadrupled in the last two decades while the number of massive geological disaster such as earthquake and tsunami remained approximately the same at around 20 a year. Over the same period, the number of people affected has increased from around 174 million to an average of over 250 million a year. Furthermore, data from UNESCAP (2015) shows that in the past 4 decades have seen a growing number of small to medium disasters which have resulted a total loss of over US$1.15 trillion. However this scale of disaster has received less attention from humanitarian agencies. At the same time the increasing number of natural disasters has increased the demand for humanitarian products, including shelter. There are many designs for emergency shelters but most are too technical and neglect the social aspects of the occupants, which makes post-disaster life more distressing for survivors. This paper explores the idea of the Humanitarian Village as an innovative design for responding small and medium-scale disasters, focusing on community-led design for better temporary pop-up shelter and village facilities for people escaping highly distressing scenarios. The paper not only proposes a technical solution for the design of emergency shelters but also investigates ways on how to manage small to medium sized disasters, particularly in the Asia Pacific region which has the highest number of total occurrences, fatalities and effects of natural disaster events.