Post-Event Reconstruction in Asia since 1999
Abstract
The concentration of human population in Asia continues to turn its seismic events into what appears to be more than its fare share of disasters. While it is home to just over 60% of the world population, during the past 50 years it has experienced 73% of global death toll due to earthquakes. It is reasonable to expect that such frequent disasters would result in changes in societal attitude towards risk that would express itself as measures aimed at reducing seismic vulnerability of the population. This paper attempts to assess such changes in societal attitudes towards seismic vulnerability through instances of post-event reconstruction. For this purpose it utilizes the inverse relationship between vulnerability and capacity of society as a touchstone and adopts two parameters of reconstruction drives as valid indicators of attitude of a society to enhance the capacity of its affected population. The first of these is adoption of owner driven reconstruction as the primary mechanism of reconstruction, while the second of these is sensitivity of a reconstruction drive towards socio-cultural characteristic of the affected population and their traditional construction systems. The study utilizes bibliographical sources and cutting-edge research and concludes that in general there is decided positive shift in societal attitudes towards reducing vulnerability through post-event reconstruction. However while this approach is clearly evident in the cases of large events, tendencies remain to neglect these higher objectives in other cases. The study also tends to indicate that this positive attitude has yet to permeate in the normal developmental activities of the societies for their larger vulnerability to reduce with time.
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