magnitude hazards, such as tropical storms or
floods and tsunamis people can be warned of
their approach. In these cases, lives could be
saved through evacuation into disaster-resistant
shelters or to safe locations such as high ground
at community level. These shelters could have
alternative uses when there are no imminent
hazards, which would help to avoid the high cost
involved in increasing the resistance level of a lot of
housing from medium to high.
In PCR, it is important to involve the end users
in thinking about the types and levels of standards,
regulations and compliance processes required for
disaster-resistant reconstruction. In considering
how regulatory frameworks could be made to work
better for housing the urban poor Payne and Majale
(2004) outlined a series of guiding principles on
which the conceptualisation of such frameworks
would need to be based. These guiding principles,
summarised in the table below, can also be useful
for deciding on standards and regulations for post-
disaster reconstruction.
Similarly, it is worth considering the newly
revised minimum Sphere standards for Shelter and
Settlement (The Sphere Project, 2011). Whilst
Guiding principles for getting standards right
• Recognise and accept the realities on the ground
• Focus on key aspects of public concern
• Understand and acknowledge knowledge and
information systems of people living in poverty
• Adopt an enabling role
• Invest in precedents drawn from targeted
research and pilot projects
• Strengthen inclusiveness
• Promote partnerships between key stakeholders
• Facilitate local ownership of processes
• Identify champions of change and create a
critical mass
• Apply rules consistently
• Integrate planning and development strategies
• Accept regulations as a process rather than a
product
• Acknowledge the principles of incremental
development
• Guarantee access to information
• Take advantage of windows of opportunity
• Build institutional capacity
• Cultivate political and professional will
• Consider enforcement still as important,
although enforcement mechanisms may have to
be modified from those conventionally used for
the regulation of construction.
Minimum Sphere standards for shelter and
settlement
1. Strategic planning: Shelter and settlement
strategies contribute to the security, safety,
health and well-being of both displaced and
non-displaced affected populations and promote
recovery and reconstruction where possible.
2. Settlement planning: The planning of return,
host or temporary communal settlements enables
the safe and secure use of accommodation and
essential services by the affected population.
3. Covered living space: People have sufficient
covered living space providing thermal comfort,
fresh air and protection from the climate
ensuring their privacy, safety and health and
enabling essential household and livelihood
activities to be undertaken.
4. Construction: Local safe building practices,
materials, expertise and capacities are used
where appropriate, maximising the involvement
of the affected population and local livelihood
opportunities.
5. Environmental impact: Shelter and settlement
solutions and the material sourcing and
construction techniques used minimise adverse
impact on the local natural environment.
these standards are focused on emergency and
transitional shelter, the underlying principles are
often also valid for permanent reconstruction.
Approaches to determining the quality
of reconstruction
When deciding how to set the level of construction
quality in reconstruction after disasters (or for the
mitigation of them), authorities and agencies have
a number of options that include:
• adopting international standards
• adhering to a national framework
• setting regulations in the context of a specific
reconstruction strategy
• Allowing users to decide on quality.
In People-Centred Reconstruction, it is
important for the people affected by disasters to
have a say not just in how houses are designed or
constructed, but also in what level of quality should
be adopted. If other stakeholders set quality at
levels that appear unachievable or unreasonable
to those people, it can subsequently become quite
difficult to obtain their interest and participation in
projects. What approach is most appropriate is very
much dependent on the local context and needs to
be decided on a case-by-case basis.
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