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 60

while the community-driven approach consisted in the empowering and
participatory of local people. In the latter, communities have come together to
determine their needs and priorities, choose its leadership for the recovery,
acquire labor and construction materials, and supervise the reconstruction pro-
cess (Chang et al. 2011 ; Steinberg 2007 ).
In this paper, we discuss and contrast these two approaches in two specifi c villages,
which we believe represent best the two general trends that took place during the
reconstruction of Banda Aceh City. These two villages are Alue Deah Tengoh and
Lambung both located in Meuraxa sub-district. Alue Deah Tengoh constitutes the
common approach to reconstruction where the provision of housing was based on the
initiative of several donors. This donor-driven approach was implemented due to the
low number of survivors that returned to the village after the disaster and yet needed
housing. In contrast, the reconstruction program in Lambung extensively involved the
community. This process was initiated before discussions took place between donors
and community leaders. The aim of the study is to fi nd out what resulted from these
two approaches and evaluate the current state of development of each village.

5.2 Study Area and Method

5.2.1 Study Area

The study was located in Meuraxa, a sub-district of Banda Aceh city (Fig. 5.1 ). This
area was selected because it was heavily damaged by tsunami 2004 and is often
labeled as “the ground zero area of tsunami 2004”. Since it is located in the strategic
part of the city, many recovery efforts started with emergency operations followed
by the re-initiation of medium and long-term development plans. This area epito-
mizes the coordinated efforts that took place in the context of post disaster Aceh and
makes it a valuable source of data for the evaluation of the reconstruction process.
It is also where many lessons learned for future environmental recovery.

5.2.2 Method

This research analyses time series satellite images, reviewed housing and other
reconstruction archives, conducted questionnaire survey for residents (45 house-
hold respondents in Lambung and 62 respondents in Alue Deah Tengoh represent-
ing about 15 % of house owners) and interviews with key village informants
revealing the village situation prior to tsunami and its current state of development.
For the satellite images, we used three sets of Quickbird images taken on 23 June
2004, 28 December 2004 and Worldview images 2 March 2011. The pre-tsunami
situation studied from the Quickbird images of 23 June 2004 and 28 December