Post-Disaster Housing Reconstruction in Indonesia: Review and Lessons from Aceh, Yogyakarta, West Java and West Sumatera Earthquakes

Abstract

The post-disaster situation offers opportunities to rebuild liveable environment for achieving safer communities in the future, and housing reconstruction plays a crucial role in rebuilding the communities. In the past decade, Indonesia has experienced several major destructive earthquakes causing severe damages to infrastructures and human settlements. An ex-post review of the past experiences and challenges in post-disaster housing reconstruction after earthquakes in Aceh (2004), Yogyakarta (2006), West Java (2009) and West Sumatera (2009) reveals some strategic issues in implementing safer housing reconstruction that have to be addressed in the future for achieving “build back better” post-disaster reconstruction programs. Past experiences showed that training and capacity building of construction personnel and home-owners, through the dissemination of guidelines and manuals as well as building codes and standards for anti-seismic design, which have been implemented in the housing reconstruction programs by the national and local governments, NGOs and aid agencies have improved the practices by builders and masons in the areas that had experienced major earthquakes, but in general the attitudes of the building industry as well as local government building administrators in ensuring the housing earthquake safety still need to improve. Nevertheless, some good practices have been observed in several post-disaster housing reconstruction programs that shed the light to the development of better strategies for achieving earthquake safer housing, through the introduction of various supporting policies such as better project delivery systems, better mechanism for providing supervision and technical advices, more down-to-earth training and capacity building mechanism as well as smarter financing and incentives system, supported by appropriate technology approaches. Awareness building program is an important part of the mechanism and should be taken out seriously as it affect significantly the risk perception of the stakeholders, which is one of the key elements in the decision making process in investing for safer housing.