Lessons Learned from Two Villages in the Tsunami Most Affected Area of Banda Aceh City; A Review of the Housing Reconstruction and the Current State of Village Development - Post-Tsunami Hazard: Reconstruction and Restoration - page 59

adopted in Lambung enabled the successful use of land consolidation (LC) and the
total makeover of village layout and housing plot arrangement. On the other hand,
our study reveals that the donor approach in Alue Deah Tengoh resulted in a hetero-
geneous landscape with several types of houses contributing to social inequality and
disparity. Moreover, the reconstruction of Alue Deah Tengoh did not include LC
and kept the village old layout with its meandering narrow streets and poor acces-
sibility. These features are bond to hinder the upgrading and maintenance of urban
utility services as well as the evacuation process during future disasters. In the light
of this study, we thus recommend that community driven approach should be imple-
mented in post-disaster reconstruction programs.

Keywords Housing reconstruction ￿ Housing provision approach ￿ Land consolidation
￿ Post-disaster village development

5.1 Introduction

5.1.1 Background

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 damaged almost the entire coast of
Aceh Province and its most affl uent cities, Banda Aceh and Meulaboh. This event
is one of the largest tsunamis recorded on the coasts of Indian Ocean and the Bay of
Bengal (Liew et al. 2010 ). The tsunami inundation in Banda Aceh reached as far as
5 km inland (Prasetya et al. 2011 ; Paris et al. 2007 ), taking some 120,000 lives
within Banda Aceh. It was assumed that around 88,000 housing units in Aceh had
to be replaced, and some 71,000 units needed to be rehabilitated. It also became
evident that the residential infrastructure (water, sanitation, roads, electricity, etc.)
as well as social facilities, had been affected and that the overall infrastructure of
Aceh's coastal villages and settlements required substantial investment for their
reconstruction (Steinberg 2007 ).
Post disaster development in Banda Aceh was initially conducted by the central
government and the Indonesian army. Due to their limited capacity and resources,
they soon conceded their leadership to international and national NGOs with regards
to vital aid, rehabilitation and housing reconstruction. In May 2005, the Indonesian
government established Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (BRR). It man-
dated the BRR to implement rehabilitation and reconstruction programs as well as
coordinate the effort of donors and international agencies. However, the overload of
responsibilities onto the BRR furthered the lack of coordination and engendered
greater confusion among bilateral, multilateral agencies and NGOs. Due to the
absence of central administration, the BRR practically gave a free hand to all NGOs
(Steinberg 2007 ) leading to an eclectic post disaster development in Aceh.
The two main strategies towards reconstruction were the donor-driven and
the community-driven approaches. The donor-driven reconstruction pursued
contractor-built implementation for housing reconstruction (Chang et al. 2011 )