Building numbers: the case of post Tsunami housing in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Top-down approach used to build housing for the Tsunami victims in Sri Lanka evolved around the number of houses destroyed. The selection of land and the number of units to be built were donor-biased decisions. This Building-Numbers may have satisfied the donors and builders for quantification of their achievements but not necessarily the recipients for various reasons. Many recipients have left those houses and some never occupied theirs. Enlarging schism between man, society and place, and further displacing the settler as a result are defined here as the research problem. We have studied a few housing projects in the Southern Province, using a 4 multidisciplintfry approach framed by sociocultural based settlement planning and morphologically oriented house types. We used qualitative research methods to collect field data. Our findings suggest that building of settlements that are beyond mere collections of numbers could have had more success in term of resurrecting the lost villages.