- Two Years of Settlement Recovery in Aceh and Nias. What should planners have learnt?   click here to open paper content125 kb
by    Dercon, Bruno | bruno.dercon@unhabitat.org   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
In post-disaster contexts, planning depends on real-space recovery shaped by decisions from people under duress. The behaviour of the tsunami victims in Aceh went against the preconceptions of many planners. UN-HABITAT's planning work in Aceh started from real-space recovery.
Abstract
In post-disaster contexts, recovery policies in general and planning policies in particular depend on real-space recovery shaped by decisions from people under duress. In general, the behaviour of the tsunami victims in Aceh and Nias went against the preconceptions of the planners – continuously and systematically. Survivors opted for recovery, not for re-planning. Therefore post-disaster situations are valuable laboratories, which provide information about the correlation between planning, policy and implementation. However, the challenges are not well understood.

UN-HABITAT’s work in Aceh and Nias (Indonesia) in general and in Banda Aceh in particular offers interesting insights. In 2006, UN-HABITAT invited Marco Kusumawijaya to evaluate the recovery process in Aceh and Nias in terms of achievements. UN-HABITAT Housing Policy Adviser, Bruno Dercon, added his comments on the issue of planning and coordination. A central theme is that even though professionals were often well meaning in acknowledging the importance of participatory principles and consultative processes, they often failed in the implementation of those principles and processes.

Many planners indeed acted against their own textbooks – that planning cannot succeed through tabula rasa methods and that it requires institutional settings where consultation and mediation are possible. In Aceh these settings were already broken before the Tsunami, as a result of war and conflict. After the tsunami, it took planners a long time to understand that nurturing them back to life requires time.

Keywords
Post-disaster Reconstruction; Urban Governance; Urban History; Participatory Planning; Low-Income Housing
Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues
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