Knowledge management in post-disaster resettlement housing

The design community's response to natural disasters indicates that designers have difficulty in meeting the complete sheltering needs of displaced people. While many designers propose innovative solutions to emergency and transitional shelters for post-disaster relief, they seem to lack the knowledge necessary to produce permanent homes that successfully address the concerns of the displaced. Post-occupancy research on post-disaster resettlement housing reveals that designers repeat common mistakes, especially with the attempt to emulate the formal aspects of vernacular settlements of the affected communities. While the necessary knowledge is available for successful resettlement design, that knowledge seems to be inadequately managed for easy access and use in the discipline of architecture. Effective Knowledge Management (KM) in post-disaster resettlement design would aggregate lessons learned in resettlement successes and failures, organize an appropriate response to resettlement, build a conceptual framework for resettlement, and disseminate the knowledge among design professionals. In this paper, we discuss the need, approach, and substantives of KM in regard to post-disaster resettlement planning and design. We argue that KM in this particular case should be both 'mechanistic' that deals more with explicit knowledge systems and 'organic' that deals with tacit knowledge. Both are equally important when dealing with KM, because disciplines and professions are guided by mechanical standards of practice that are often taken for granted by the practitioners, but professionals also enlist organic artistry to solve indeterminate problems. A balanced approach to post-disaster planning should have mechanical approaches that 1) consolidate the settlement instead of relocating them, 2) design of settlement/dwelling models and variations, 3) make room for adaptations, and 4) adopt traditional practices to housing construction and disaster response. It should also have organic approaches that 1) include the users in the design process, 2) study the patterns of settings and activities, 3) provide support structures, and 4) change perceptions on building standards. If these approaches were codified into an operational knowledge management system, it would legitimate disaster resettlement efforts.