Building Numbers: Socio-economic aspects Of Three Wheeler Market as an Informal Public Transport

Abstract

Tsunami struck Sri Lanka on December 26th 2004. This has been the worst natural disaster in island's history. Within hours the unprecedented destruction of quick snuffed around 40,000 lives, over 80,000 houses, and hundreds of villages and towns. In planning the resurrection of the coast, state agencies, NGOs, and professional bodies considered building of 80,000 houses within a year to resettle the displaced, in a country where only 6000 houses are built annually, as a daunting task. The government of Sri Lanka, commissioning local and foreign experts to plan the post- Tsunami reconstruction, aimed at raising living standards and economic development in the devastated coast. By trading off new lands for post Tsunami settlements with the reservations where those victims used to squat, it was planned to instigate regional development and to raise standard of living. The difficulty to secure land beyond the coastal reservation and the need to integrate new communities in the national and regional economic grid forced planning mass housing. The donors and politicians welcomed building big numbers for easy quantification of their achievements and for easy logistics management. Sustaining environmental qualities and socio-cultural aspects in housing, psychological state of the displaced, and grafting the sociocultural composition of the new communities in the evolved contexts were paid less attention. Uneven distribution of housing, building on unknown locations that were also far from the places of work of the recipients, and failure to comprehend the qualitative aspects of a human habitat, which is the basic spatial unit where dwelling takes place, led to further displacement of the victims. It is possible to observe fragile societies in larger housing villages which were planned to accommodate people with diverse and sometimes even contrasting socio-cultural backgrounds. The recipients of these villages are unsettled as the type-plan houses provide less potentialfor self expression and no possibilities what-so-ever for future expansions. The failure to note the existence within a particular social context has turned their occupying a house a mere temporary one. As a result, some occupants have left the houses and some never occupied them. The new villages do not dwell the place but have become mere occupants. We, having observed the deterioration of the relationship between the three key elements of a placewhere dwelling takes place: man, society and environment, made attempts to study a few post-Tsunami housing villages in order to contribute to the development of a comprehensive strategyof human settlement planning. It is observed that some occupants seem to adapt to the location by shaping where they live according to their way of life. We also tested the strength of a participatory approach for planning and designing a housing settlement for a community affectedby a disaster in order to see if the villages could be planned as true habitats.