Date published: 2007/05/07
The second seminar in the Architecture Department's "Sustainable Design" series was presented by Yasemin Aysan (formerly UNDP and IFRC, Geneva) and Robin Spence (Cambridge), on the theme of "Building and Risk". There are lots of things you can cover under that title, and here the idea was to look at recovery from natural disasters, in particular earthquakes, and how reconstruction might be used to make buildings structurally better for the next time around.
Aysan started with a talk on "Disaster, Risk and Recovery". She's been working in the area of disaster recovery for quite some time, and provided a (relatively) historic overview. It sounded like the 1970s could be deemed to be the "bad old days" in disaster recovery, with well-meaning donor nations providing completely inappropriate housing (etc.) to nations affected by some natural disaster. Although it also seems that not all the lessons have been learnt, mainly because there seems to be no efficient mechanism to pass information on from one generation to the next. Indeed, she mentioned some manual put together by some international agency which details lessons learnt, but this agency won't even put this on the web as a PDF file, because they want to make money selling it, so many people working in disaster relief have apparently never even heard of it.
She showed a graph put together by some insurance agency, of the number of major natural disasters (however that was arbitrarily defined) from 1950 to 2005, and you can fit an increasing curve to the data (although the data is up and down, of course). She claimed that earthquakes had increased by a factor of two and climate-related natural disasters (e.g. floods) by a factor of seven. Well, the fact that earthquakes have allegedly increased by a factor of two tells you that this data must have very big natural variability, or perhaps is incomplete at the 1950 end, because there is no particular reason that earthquakes should have doubled in 50 years. Climate-related disasters are another matter. Everyone believes those surely must have increased. But it was interesting that they included heatwaves as disasters but didn't include freezing to death (from not being able to afford to heat one's house).
And just looking at the number of disasters is misleading in any case, since one should also look at their impact, in particular in terms of fatalities. Those are increasing even more, because with a doubling of the world's population between 1950 and today, more and more people are forced to live in high risk areas (e.g. flood plains, mountain sides liable to slip, etc.).
And it seems that there is also limited understanding by people of the risks they face. This is particularly true of earthquakes, which typically are a once in a lifetime event. And it is difficult to enforce safety requirements, with regard to both land use and building regulations, in many countries.
Aysan mentioned various ways that housing reconstruction has been approached after a disaster, over the years. One approach was labeled as "industrialised", and meant that some organisation took control and built was it deemed was to be suitable housing. Another approach was labeled as "owner built", and meant that owners were (usually) given some money and told to go and rebuild their own house. Both approaches seem to sometimes work and sometimes not. Apparently the one option that is deemed bad by pretty much everyone in the field is forced relocation. (Well, in some circumstances that might be the only option.)
One could take the destruction of housing as an opportune time to rebuild to a higher standard, in particular with regard to earthquakes. And it seems that the international agencies give lip service to this idea. But it seems that on the ground this rarely happens. And Aysan even said that in some locations people have purposefully reverted to old-style, unsafe, housing, because that is what they were used to and liked.
Aysan was not that flattering about the NGOs involved in disaster recovery. For example, after the Boxing Day tsunami they were inundated with money, much more than normal. And it seems that many of the NGOs specialise in emergency relief, and had so much money left over after this relief was no longer needed, that they branched out into reconstruction, even though they had no expertise in this, because they didn't want to (or perhaps couldn't) hand over the money to someone more expert in this area. And it seems that even more than a proliferation of disasters, we have had a proliferation of NGOs.
Robin Spence then talked about "Building for Safety in Earthquakes". He covered much of the same ground, but more from a research point of view. It seems that deaths due to earthquakes in rich countries has plummeted since 1950, but not in poor countries. This is hardly surprising, since rich people can afford to put up better buildings. In poor countries the number of deaths per million from earthquakes fluctuates quite a lot even from decade to decade (showing how rare these events are), with at worst around 15 deaths per million people per year. That does not sound like a lot. And Spence said that earthquakes account for only around a quarter of deaths from natural disasters and that deaths from natural disasters are only around a tenth of deaths from road transport.
So right there you can ask (as someone did at the end) if this is such a big deal or if there were more important things to worry about (clean water, education, etc.). Well, natural disasters provide great television for the rich countries, so always get lots of attention. Any event where a lot of people die in one event always gets more attention. Even in the UK, if four people die in a train crash the media goes hysterical for weeks on end, but many more people die on the roads and nobody pays more than five seconds attention to it.
Spence claimed, as did Aysan, that in some earthquakes vernacular buildings often did better than ones constructed using allegedly modern building standards. Well, it's hard to know how seriously to take this. He referred to a couple of people who took some photos after some disasters and came to this conclusion. But how valid is it? It wasn't clear if anyone had really done a proper study. A lot of the problem with modern buildings (at least in poor countries) is not that engineers don't know how to put them up properly, but that the people who put them up did not do so properly, presumably either out of ignorance or to save money, and nobody in authority did anything to stop this happening.
One of the things that Aysan said at the end was that usually there were no studies long after the disaster as to what worked and what didn't. The disaster agencies are happy just to tick the end-of-term boxes (number of houses built, etc.) and go onto the next disaster.
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