Post-disaster low-cost housing solutions - Rebuilding After Disasters: From Emergency to Sustainability - page 25

2 Post-disaster low-cost housing
solutions
Learning from the poor
Gonzalo Lizarralde
Governmental and non-governmental organizations alike often lead reconstruction
programmes that include direct planning, design and management of housing projects.
Even in cases in which some form of consultation with beneficiaries is accomplished,
these initiatives are too often based on concentrated decision-making aimed at obtain-
ing a unique housing model that is repeated and offered to residents. The common
failure of these practices suggests that decision-makers (and some researchers) are
failing to look for answers where they can, realistically, be found - namely in the
informal housing sector.
Concentrated decision-making - why and why not
Trying to identify the conditions that need to be considered for economic
recovery, wellbeing and long-term development in a regular low-cost hous-
ing project is a major challenge, and without any doubt it is even more
difficult in the disruption of a post-disaster situation. Governmental and
non-governmental organizations alike often tackle this complexity by at-
tempting to plan, design and manage post-disaster housing through a process
that brings a considerable number of responsibilities into the hands of one
entity (and few people) that collects and uses the available information. In
this chapter I refer to this attempt as 'a concentrated decision-making proc-
ess' to remind readers that decisions made under this approach are made
upon the information collected by one or a few organizations (in contrast to
a decentralized individually driven approach, which I describe later in this
chapter). The natural response is, most often, designing a unique housing
model that responds as well as it is reasonably possible to the problems that
have been identified, considering the limited information that is available.
Before being studied in the context of post-disaster reconstruction, this ap-
proach to design was largely studied by Nobel economics prize-winner Hebert
Simon in his milestone work The Sciences of the Artificial . 14 According to
Simon, organizations confronted with complex 'artificial' problems (prob-
lems in which human artifices are at stake, such as housing) are interested in
how things ought to be . However, the complexity and dynamics of variables
and information required to design how things ought to be make it virtually