© Logan Abassi/MINUSTAH via Getty Images
Aid continues to arrive in post-quake Haiti, and survivors, without homes, are seeking shelter. Currently, the dislocated and dispersed survivors are living in temporary makeshift tents, in the still unstable urban core / epicenter. Efforts are now being made to transport the survivors into new, temporary villages. The International Organization for Migration reports that 472,000 individuals are in the process of being relocated into villages out of the reported 1.5 million homeless. The IOM press release continues:
These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the leveling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation.
How these new settlements are going to be located, where, why. How are design and infrastructure going to be created to support an entire new network of a country? Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and the Open Architecture Network, has laid out a rough schematic for a time line of reconstruction here, and is partnering with several groups under the auspices of the Haiti Rebuilding Coalition. I think that Arch. for Humanity has a successful record of synthesizing local and international knowledge, incorporating the community, and establishing relationships. Open source work has also proved to be a successful strategy.
But. I do believe that this is essentially new territory – this is going to be a process of country building; and with regards to the equation of poverty, pre-existent infrastructure, earthquake, and displacement – a process of an unknown scale. It is crucial that landscape architects and urban designers and planners, become involved with this process as soon as possible.
I started this post with the discussion of shelter and settlements, and it is to that I will return. Temporary villages often become permanent settlements – layers of shelter, community and infrastructure become inextricable. The areas in yellow are “shantytowns”.
Haiti Earthquake Fact Sheet, http://www.usaid.gov/helphaiti/
The decisions to move communities and establish settlements cannot be hasty, though the need to relocate is crucial. Quick decisions are going to occur with long-term ramifications for cities, boundaries, economies, and agriculture. It is crucial to establish a staging ground for appropriate and considered development to occur. The intervention of landscape architects and urban designers and planners is critical because the fabric of Haiti is going to change drastically, and an understanding of system-wide design must accompany the efforts of civil engineering.
As populations move outwards, into outlying regions, critical water, power, communication infrastructures must precede as well as develop alongside new communities. Individuals and organizations familiar with large-scale placement of development and place-making, who can work with the community structures that, for example, Arch. for Humanity has experience in creating, along with establishing new regimes of settlement. Malignant poverty, and the autonomous informal settlement patterns that it creates must be addressed. A decentralization is inevitable, as Port-au-Prince has been decimated. Haitians have the potential to redefine a large pattern of settlement essentially from ground-zero.
The informal settlement pattern of the Haitian impoverished can be realized as a mechanism and logic for growth. An intentional capitalization on the experience, resourcefulness, and knowledge of the population, combined with a reconceptualization of design and infrastructure, has the potential to revitalize Haiti in the medium to long term. Tactics must be articulated that lead to approaches that bridge the often linear nature of infrastructural and ecological engineering with the organic growth and construction practices of the displaced population. Tactics, as a set of operations, are mutable and dynamic processes, Here, these tactics need to result in a multifaceted and simultaneous regime of ongoing medical care, shelter and space making, and design infected infrastructural remediation.
