Creation from catastrophe: The need for architects and social scientists to collaborate

It is early February 2005. I am in Sri Lanka, together with two colleagues, Hans Skotte, an architect, and Ragnhild Lund, a geographer like myself. On December the 26th 2004, just over a month before we arrived, the Indian Ocean Tsunami had devastated the coasts of the island. As a team, we had many years of research-engagement with Sri Lanka. During 2004, and as a result of the ceasefire between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, we were setting up a collaboration on post-war recovery together with an international humanitarian organisation with long-term presence in the country. We discussed how to influence current World Bank plans to build 100,000 houses in the war-torn north of the country, aiming to advocate for more active inclusion of local knowledge and existing practices together with a more participatory approach. Then the waves hit the coastline, the conflict gradually resumed and all the attention turned to housing needs caused by the tsunami. By January 2005, our initiative had shifted to concentrate on post-tsunami housing.

The collaboration that followed between the architect and the social scientists was crucial for how the project developed and formative for me as a social scientist. But the journey towards that achievement was long and sometimes painful. One example of the differences we encountered, and eventually learnt to appreciate, came on one of these first days in Sri Lanka in February 2005. With Sri Lankan academics and the collaborating organisation, we were invited by the head-planner in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka to visit some of the sites they were planning to use for building houses. When we arrived to the site, the architect and geographers encountered the field in fundamentally different ways.

Arriving at the site used for transitional shelters for people affected by the tsunami, the architect went off with the planner to assess the site, discuss the challenges, and produce drawings. The ethnographically-oriented geographers sat down with the people in the settlement who wanted to talk about the experiences, the losses, the needs and most of all their worries for the future. People in the settlement frequently experienced becoming a silent audience to all the delegations arriving at the site. It was difficult for them to distinguish between the different actors that arrived, foreign and national do-gooders, academic researchers, international humanitarian organisations, journalists. People came – and left – without making much difference, except hassle, for the people affected by the disaster.

At the time, we – the social scientists – considered the architect’s attitude to the field unethical, insensitive and offensive. How could he not see the people, understand their losses, their histories, their plans for the future and take time to be with them? He, on the other hand spent his energy explaining to the planner why – based on his experiences from other disaster- and war-zones – the plans would not work, why they needed to change their approach to rebuilding and recovery.

He, the architect, was right and we, the social scientists, were right too. It took some time, before we managed to understand, appreciate and utilise the different approaches to the field, but it was when we managed to see how our different interests and approaches could help to understand how the material world and the social world came together that we could actually make a difference.

The process of rebuilding the coastal communities in Sri Lanka after the tsunami was highly politicised. After the tsunami and more recently after the end of the war in the country,  a highly technocratic understanding of recovery and development  has dominated the discourse and the practices.  But what we can learn from the RIBA exhibition, Creation from Catastrophe, is that the coming together of the social and the material is needed if we want to create something from catastrophe.

The exhibition showcases grand plans from the cities of the Global North. Creating an entirely new city after the fires in cities such as London and Chicago proved impossible. The grand plans, we now know, did not succeed, largely because the complex property- and landowner structures prevented the planning efforts of the architects and technocrats from materialising. Additionally, the grand plans did not take into account how people went about their lives in the cities. More recently, we are witnessing the same taking place in Aleppo in Syria. The government is designing grand plans for the city, but the residents and users of the city are not being heard.

Rebuilding after a human-made or natural disaster does not provide us with a blank sheet: There is a history already there, a social structure and aspirations among the residents that may not correspond with an abstract idea of the city. War and disasters tend to change the relationship between people and places, but the places are formed by a history that started before the catastrophe struck. The possibilities of recovery in a particular context need to take into account the holistic meaning of a particular building, a particular neighbourhood, and the city. A major challenge for training architects to work in a disaster is thus to integrate the understanding of the social into their work. The main challenge for training social scientists to work in the same context is to open up for an understanding of the role of the material and physical environment. It is about opening up for and being able to work in an interdisciplinary way, to be able to see and understand the context in which housing is created after a catastrophe.

Social scientists, architects and others working in a disaster setting need to learn how to connect theory and practice, and at the same time learn how to think with other disciplines and cross-fertilise different experiences, perspectives and knowledges. This is not only about the architects and the social scientists: more importantly it is about the residents of the houses and neighbourhoods that are being built. It is this relationship between theory and practice and between the different actors and contexts that we aim to create a critical understanding of through our teaching in the Development and Emergency Practice MA at Oxford Brookes.

An exhibition – Creation from Catastrophe - is on at the RIBA till the 24th of April.

These reflections were prepared for a seminar  
“Creation and Catastrophe” on the 7th April 2016 which CENDEP co-organised.

Cathrine Brun, April 7th 2016
  

If you want to read more:

Attanapola, C., C. Brun and R. Lund. 2013. Working gender after crisis: partnerships and disconnections in Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Gender, Place and Culture 20(1): 70-86.

Brun, C. and R. Lund. 2010. Real Time Research: Decolonising practices or just another spectacle of researcher-practitioner collaboration. Development in Practice 20(7): 812–826.

Brun, C. and R. Lund. 2009. ‘Unpacking’ the narrative of a national housing policy in Sri Lanka. Norwegian Journal of Geography 63(1): 10–22.

Brun, C. and R. Lund. 2008. Making a home during crisis: Post-tsunami recovery in the context of war, Sri Lanka. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29(3): 274–288.

Skotte, H. 2014. Teaching to learn – learning to teach: learning experiences from the reality of an ever-changing world. In Brun, C., P. Blaikie and M. Jones. (eds.) 2014. Alternative Developmend. Unravelling Marginliazation, Voicing Change, pp. 39 – 54. Ashgate, Farnham.