disaster management

Appropriate shelter reconstruction and domed villages for the world

We recently visited the village of New Ngelepen in Prambanan sub-district, Imigiri district, east Jogyakarta, affectionately referred to as “Teletubby village” by locals. New Ngelepen was built by the non-profit organisation “Domes for the World Foundation”, who are based in Salt Lake City and build Monolithic EcoShells in communities around the world. I recently interviewed Dave Hodgkin about New Ngelepen, discussing the domed village as an example of post-earthquake reconstruction (Jogyakarta earthquake, May 2006).

Dave has worked in community-based housing and the sustainable construction industry for over twenty years, and more recently has worked in emergency shelter in disasters across Asia. He lives in Jogyakarta, and worked in a number of significant roles during the Jogyakarta earthquake recovery, including technical advisor to the Shelter Cluster. We discussed the nature of appropriate disaster response as well as the Cluster approach (a relatively recent initiative to strengthen humanitarian disaster response by faciliting interaction between the multitude of actors and supporting coherence and equity across disaster relief).

DFTW’s final summary of the project can be found here. An excerpt from that page describes the project:

“The new, completed village is comprised of 71 houses, 6 MCKs (laundry, toilet and shower facilities), a mosque, primary school, playground and medical clinic. The homes are clustered in groups of 12 surrounding an MCK and green space. Six new wells have been drilled to supply each cluster with potable water at the source. Six independent septic systems have been installed. Each home is equipped with ample ventilation, light fixtures and power outlets. Clean drinking water flows from every faucet in every kitchen in the village.”

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Kim: Dave, the first time that I saw “New Ngelepen” was from the air, flying into Jogyakarta. In the midst of the brown landscape of fields, dry rice paddies, coconut trees and houses, the white domes stood out like a strange lunar landscape. What were your first impressions of visiting the village? What are your initial reactions as an emergency shelter consultant?

Dave: Well, I have a mixed reaction. One is that there’s nothing inherently negative about building a series of earthquake-resistant houses after an earthquake. Clearly, an NGO building a village full of earthquake-resistant houses is a positive thing. But for me, in reviewing such projects, it’s more about how well you could have assisted a community, more about what you could of got right rather than just focusing on what you know you did get right. Too often reviews only assess the positive things they did achieve and conveniently overlook what they might have achieved.

Kim: I’m assuming that there would have been a range of different types of earthquake resistant housing that could have been built?

Dave: Actually, you can build an earthquake-resistant house out of pretty much anything, Kim: rice husks … paper … leaves … stone, bricks, timber, bamboo … It’s not a material-specific problem. I always remember a classic test that is put to engineering students to design and construct a vessel so they can drop an egg off a five or six storey building and have it not break. Commnonly students are set this task using improbable materials, such as being newspaper, string or glass… and nothing else. Drop egg off building: build something out of a newspaper that will stop the egg breaking. It’s completely plausible and possible, you just have to think about the aerodynamics and making sure it lands on the right point on whatever object you’ve made, make it crumpled etc. It’s a simple exercise, but one that challenges our mental perceptions of material constraints. Earthquake resistant housing is just as plausible from glass, brick, string, plastic, cement, bamboo, timber or sand … materials are not the limiting factor, design and construction are.

Kim: So what is the most important factor in post-earthquake reconstruction? How important is it to have an earthquake-resistant house?

Dave: I’d say that the importance of it is generally over-estimated by the reconstruction agencies, largely because both they and their donors are conservative.

Kim: They’re conservative? Someone’s built a domed village, and that’s conservative?

Dave: Yes, that’s conservative in that that they’ll know it will work: it’s overengineering. In reality, in the Jogyakarta earthquake, nearly all the buildings that did fall over, did so because they were simply badly constructed, not because the community did not have the knowledge or access to suitable and appropriate earthquake resistant technology. An international famous building triage expert noted that, for only a Richter 6 earthquake, the volume of housing destruction is the 3^rd worst in recorded global disaster history.

By far the majority of houses that fell down in Jogja were built using extremely poorly single brick construction. Without a major earthquake in living memory, the quality of construction in the region had diminished and diminished overtime, whilst the city had expanded rapidly in that period. Quality of local brick manufacture is poor, timber sizes have got smaller and smaller, cement ratios in concrete have got leaner and leaner etc.

It should be recognized however that the post-earthquake mass adoption of post and beam concrete construction with steel reinforcing and brick infill is a vast improvement on the original single brick construction technique, and although many quality control issues remain, this system of construction is more than adequate for single or even double story domestic construction. Indonesia has a perfectly adequate earthquake resistant construction code for this form of construction and it’s clearly a construction methodology the community feels comfortable with.

Kim: Ok, so earthquake-resistant housing is clearly a good thing. Are there any potential negatives there?

Dave: I’m not saying that building super earthquake-resistant housing is a good thing, I’m saying that going and getting a chunk of money and building some people who don’t have any houses some houses that won’t fall down: that’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing, is it. In a similar way, if people are hungry, give them some food. But in the same way that it’s probably better to give them a fishing rod, the same classic argument can be applied to the Shelter Cluster: in the same way that you talk about the fishing rod rather than giving people a fish, what’s the best thing you can give people in terms of shelter? The ability, capacity and desire to build a house that is more appropriate than the one that fell down, or transfer knowledge of adequate construction.

Kim: And that’s better than giving them a house … a domed house?

Dave: Well it’s not about minding whether it’s a domed house or not. We need to recognize that post disaster reconstruction will take many many years. What you’re trying to say is when I leave, when I walk out the door, what are you going to construct? How can I improve or help you to improve what you are going to construct? Now, if you walk out the door after building domed houses, how many people will spontaneously think “I’m going to build a domed house”. I haven’t seen anybody in this region build a domed house by their own initiative. You go to that domed village and what you actually see is happening is that people are building extensions to the domes using traditional building methods. And they’re using the same methods that they used pre-earthquake, methods that are not earthquake resistant. So come back in 50 years and you are going to have a village full of earthquake-proof domes buried amongst completely none earthquake-resistant additions: sheds, and houses for kids, and rooms and extensions and everything under the sun. That’s what’s going to happen. So how much knowledge transfer was there…? Where is that communities’ fishing rod? Though for sure, it’s ok to feel proud that you provided hungry people with fish… a homeless community certainly has been housed.

So instead, imagine if I came into a community and spent half of my dollars actually talking to people about what ”earthquake-resistant” actually meant - in fact, get rid of that term, I almost don’t like it - if I started talking to people about what quality construction is, and how to build properly, and then started working with communities to look at affordable systems for communities that fit in with their image of what a building is and what it should be and what they want and desire and dream of. Systems that use available local materials, support local cultural practice and norms, and affirm and promote the communities own aesthetic values. Then imagine arriving at a shared solution. You want to get to the point where the community is building something that the community wants, and hopefully something that is built better than what the community built before and most importantly hopefully it’s something that the community will spontaneously reproduce because they understand it, they believe in it and it works for them.

Kim: And you can help in that process of enabling or supporting them to achieve that.

Dave: Yes. Our role is to come up with the most minimalist intervention that we can. We are trying to work out the smallest intervention that we can make that will help people on their personal ongoing journey from inadequate shelter to adequate permanent shelter. We need to stop thinking of houses as finished static objects and instead realize that for all of us our homes are a ‘process’ that evolves with our ever changing needs and capacity to realize those needs. In post-disaster shelter assistance, we play but a small albeit critical role in the eventual re-housing of each family. Prior to the Jogja earthquake, the average house size in the affected community was 90m², most assistance provided 18-24m² for emergency and transitional shelter and 36m² for permanent shelter assistance. Come back here in 30 years and the vast majority of those structures will have expanded grown and changed over time. For me then the question becomes how can we ensure the work we do now influences that future development, so that when we do return 30-50 years hence, we find a community that is continuing to build in a risk-averse manner.

Kim: How similar is your vision of that to the shelter reconstruction efforts of aid agencies internationally? How widely shared is it?

Dave: Although there are many of with a shared vision, there’s are also lots of people who don’t have much vision about shelter at all. They’ve just got a job … in shelter. Last year they were running a livelihoods program, this year they’re running a shelter program. But globally there is definitely a group of people who have a fairly common shared vision - almost jokingly called the “Shelter Mafia”. There are a series of technical issues and a series of ethical or stylistic issues that are important in shelter that a lot of us would generally agree on, almost in an unspoken fashion.

Kim: How do you manage to agree on them if they are unspoken?

Dave: I guess because much of it is self-evident and obvious. For example, who was the biggest external financial donor in the Jogyakarta earthquake response? The government gave out 15 million rupiah to 250 thousand families. It was a massive donation. So it’s easy to say that the answer is the government. But in fact, get rid of the word “donor”, and ask who put the most money or resources into the disaster? The answer is always the families; the communities themselves. They supplied their labour, they topped up their 15 million rupiah - the building that we’re looking at just across the road that was built after the earthquake, that would have cost 50-60 million to build, not 15. 15 helped. And that’s universal. The community is doing the bulk of the work. If you start from that perspective, you see that your intervention is small and needs to be quite strategic and timely. From that perspective then, community participation at all stages of the design, implementation and even review of a shelter program clearly must be a priority.

Kim: Ah … so by default, our efforts going to be small.

Dave. Yes. It’s just going to be small. So then you need to be strategic and say, “What is the best intervention I could make?”

Kim: That’s interesting. I haven’t encountered that perspective much before. I suppose it’s obvious, but the perceptions that you get from the aid industry will be, by definition, slightly distorted pictures of what is happening: the reports and PR materials will focus on their aid projects, and not really tell you about the work that communities are doing.

Dave: Yes. Now this [the image above] is a classic example where the local community is trying to adapt the local architecture to their needs. They weren’t supplied with a verandah, but in this culture you’re going to leave your shoes outside and it rains a lot, so the community built awnings at the doors of every house.

Here is another example: you have a dome, built by an aid agency, and attached to it is what the community’s built, which is an absolutely standard completely non-earthquake-resistant structure. It doesn’t even have any diagonal bracing. In the first earthquake that’s going to fall on whoever’s living in it, as they run out of the dome. This is a village which, out of all of the villages, learnt very little about how to improve the earthquake-resistance of their standard construction.

Kim: But ended up with earthquake-resistant housing.

Dave: No, they’ve ended up with small blobs of earthquake-resistant housing that will form a part of their evolving future house. These buildings are minute; the houses in this area are large. If we come back in ten years time, those families will be living in houses of which more than 50% will not be a dome. They will expand their houses. Absolutely.

To me, projects like this are a form of cultural arrogance. Well, perhaps not cultural arrogance – I guess more intellectual arrogance. “We have the perfect solution, we will come and you will do it.”. We don’t live in it, our family and friends don’t, your family and friends don’t, but we think you should because its some form of intellectually ideal structure.

This form of arrogance is much easier than true community participation, but please don’t get me wrong, the dome village although visually striking is not the only example of this technological narrow mindedness in the Jogyakarta earthquake response. For example, one or two agencies came and built core houses using BlueScope steel. I can show you one of those, you can walk around and see them. It was a similar thing, they came in and decided that rather than wasting money building temporary bamboo houses, they would come along and build these zinc-plated steel-framed houses, again a foreign technology, leaving communities with a core structure that they don’t really understand or know how to renovate, extend or maintain.…

In disasters our core mission is to supply timely and strategic inputs to assist families achieve a rapid return to normality. We are dealing with a traumatised population suffering great loss, and our job is to get them back to a normal life: to help them return to work, help them return to living in adequate shelter, etc. and in doing so, help them to return to a state that is more disaster resilient.

Kim: It seems like these domes are so far from the Javanese concept of a house. How many aspects of the concept of what a Javanese house “is” would these kinds of buildings transgress?

Dave: That’s very hard to answer. It would be more interesting to ask how many do they not transgress? I would say that the aspects that they do not transgress include … “it houses a family.” I’m not sure I would even accept that it has a roof and it has walls, by the Javanese concept of a house. How many of the multitudinous roles of a home in Javanese culture do these domes provide aside from shelter from rain… I’m not sure.

Kim: It’s got windows. And it’s got doors.

Dave: Well, it’s waterproof.

Kim: It’s waterproof, it’s got windows and doors, it houses a family … it’s got flowers out the front - does that count?

Dave: No, because the families did that themselves. It does have separated bedrooms, and a kitchen space and a living space.

Kim: Yes, but they’re like segments of a pie.

Dave: I suppose in every way for me, it transgresses the community’s expression of what is a house or home. You know, some hippies like to build organic buildings. Across the world, humanity could go out en masse and build organic circular buildings. But nearly universally, we’ve built non-organic shapes. We actually feel comfortable in rectilinear spaces. We find organic-shaped spaces really interesting, but actually they don’t fit our tables, chairs, beds, bookshelves, the action of hanging a painting on a wall, our whole way of encountering space. Everything we are used to doing in the way we engage in a house doesn’t work very well in an organic space.

There’s a few things that work ok - bathrooms can work pretty comfortably as curved spaces, but that’s mainly because they don’t really need walls. You need somewhere to hang your towel, but that’s about it. Kitchens don’t work that well. … neither do bedrooms, sure all of it can be worked around, but it sure is far from what we are globally comfortable with. I am not denying the few examples globally of communities with evolved organic building shapes, it’s more that I am recognizing the rarity of that architecture … and more importantly the fact that it is alien here in Java.

Kim: My next question relates to the environmental impact of the domes. What are they built of? What are the environmental implications of building it?

Dave: The domes are built out of ferrous cement (steel-reinforced concrete). In a volcanic and coral upsurgence island - which is Java - there is no shortage of upsurged coral to make cement out of, and there’s no shortage of gravel to make concrete. How much steel you put in it is always an environmental cost, as is the firing process of cement manufacture, but I think that in an earthquake-prone area, high levels of steel have some validity.

Kim: And in terms of running a house like this? I’m asking because in Canberra with its high diurnal and seasonal temperature fluctuations, we talk a lot about thermal comfort and the inherent environmental costs built into different types of housing - heating, cooling and lighting and so on.

Dave: Climatically? Climatically speaking, why would you build a high-mass structure in the tropics? There’s no insulation: insultation means thermal resistance, and there’s no practical thermal resistance in a single skin masonry structure. The fact that they are painted white would assist a bit. There is some thermal lag: the thermal lag of a 100mm concrete wall is about 8 hours, though even that that does depends a bit - thermal lag is related to thermal dissipation, and thermal dissipation is to do with thermal difference. The higher the thermal difference, the higher the rate of dissipation and therefore the lower the thermal lag. So if the temperature doesn’t change greatly between day or night as in the tropics, rates of change will be much slower. Without doubt, they will heat up over the day from the air temperature and radiant gain as per any other high thermal mass structure in the area, more so because of the higher mass roof. They will then act like a big heat bank, absorbing energy throughout the day, and probably by 4 o’clock in the afternoon they’ll be sitting at their maximum temperature, and by 9 or 10 o’clock at night, they’ll be starting to cool down. But from 5 o’clock in the afternoon until 10 o’clock at night they are going to sit well above the outside air temperature, making them uncomfortable in the evening, whilst in the morning they will carry the cool of the night before into the day.

Kim: How much does this affect the living conditions inside? Is that pleasant to live in or unpleasant, does it make much of a difference?

Dave: From a western point of view, it’s unpleasant, uncomfortable and silly in the tropics, but it also appears to be what the people of the area like. People tend to build high thermal mass structures (houses made of bricks). Engrained in Javanese culture is the concept that a non-brick house is actually called a temporary house, and a brick house is called a permanent house. This is very influenced by the elitist architecture of ruling families and of course the Dutch influence.

Also one of the difficulties is that Indonesians have a different sense of thermal comfort than Westerners. Pak Henry’s research shows human thermal comfort indices in Indonesia are slightly higher than the global accepted norms.

Kim: Dave, you speak Indonesian well and spent quite a while chatting to some of the inhabitants of the domes. What were your impressions of talking with them?

Dave: I love the way you can do an evaluation of community satisfaction: Walk into a village where everybody’s lost everything, and then been given something, and ask them whether they are happy with it. The answer’s 100% going to be yes. “I had nothing, and you gave me something. It’s wonderful. I’ve got something. I didn’t have anything. Now I’ve got something.”

Kim: No-one mentioned the acoustics of the dome? You can hear any small noise in any corner of a dome, that was something that I thought would be quite disturbing living in a dome.

Dave: No, actually the biggest problem that they expressed was concern about security of land tenure and about confusion regarding clear land ownership boundaries. They are also confused about how or where they can extend their homes and what will happen in the future. Basically the community is clearly expressing concerns about fitting into someone else’s sense of what their reality should be. Communal toilets, something that is not a social norm here, are causing problems that they spoke about and it was clear that in fact some of the communal toilet blocks have just been divided up as sharing responsibility and an agreed standard of hygiene between families is proving difficult.

I do agree that the sound issue is quite real though, round internal walls create “whispering walls” where sound travels through structures in a number of strange ways.

Kim: Would they be aware that government would have given them money to build their own permanent houses, had they not already received help for permanent housing?

Dave: Yes, I presume they would know, in fact I would not be overly surprised to hear they did get government assistance as well, as many such assisted groups still did.

In fact it’s interesting from a donor perspective, that if this type of construction did avert government assistance, then the total net value of the project is the donor’s contribution minus the lost government funds.

Again I would reiterate, our role in the humanitarian sector is simply to fill the gap between recovery capacity and need. If the government or the population at large has clearly expressed recovery capacity then I believe we are morally obligated to divert funds elsewhere as needs globally are huge and available financial resources extremely limited.

For me, when the government said they would provide all families with housing assistance and hence no need for INGOs to intervene in permanent shelter, it was then clearly time to stop planning any permanent shelter programs and look at more immediate needs. This does not mean that there would never be permanent shelter needs, in fact it is clear that as always the devil is in the details and most broad level government programs must have boarders rules and limitations and there will always be those in real need who fall through the gaps and some with no real need who get assisted, that’s normal. When the mud has settled, then I believe there was a need for an NGO assisted mop-up that went on a village-by-village level, finding who fell through the social safety net and assisting them. But that means sitting back and seeing what if anything does slip through, whilst supporting the community as best we can with their interim needs.

Kim: So is there a role for organisations like Domes For The World who want to come in to disasters and build domes?

Dave: Well, normally in disasters our core mission is to help people return to normality. That’s speaking as a disaster person working in disasters - that’s very different to development work. In disaster work, we have a traumatised population suffering great loss, and our job is to get them back to normality: to help them return to work, to help them return to living in adequate shelter, etc. and in doing so, help them to return to a state that is more disaster resilient. So they are inherently better prepared for the next occurance: we’re trying to improve their disaster preparedness. That’s the same if we want to talk about food, water, shelter, hygiene. That’s the goal.

I think that in development there are different issues. In development, we’re trying to sit down and say, These people, for whatever reason, haven’t got something that we believe they need, and we need to help them develop to this next level or stage. Then you’re saying, We want to introduce new technology, we want to introduce computers, or improved health care systems, improved housing systems. Then there’s more of a place for the introduction of new technology.

In disasters, the less new technology we can introduce the better, the more normal the outcome the better. Minimalist intervention is the order of the day. So unless we have a disaster in a dome-based community I see little excuse for, what is in effect, using a traumatized population as guinea pigs for some broader social development experiment. I do believe there is plenty of scope for these organizations to find communities where the structural form they intend is culturally and environmentally appropriate, the heartland of Javanese culture does not seem to me to be one of them.

Kim: So what do you do if you have one organisation that wants to build domes, and another wants to give out shelter boxes, and others who want bamboo structures: what do you do?

Dave: You try to guide as many of them as possible, to encourage them to work together to come to a shared and common view - working together, and in conjunction with the government and the communities. I think it’s about shepherding people towards logical solutions, and logical solutions tend to be solutions that make sense to communities: appropriate technology is technology that gets appropriated. So you’re trying to push Clusters towards appropriatable technology. My job when working in cluster coordination is never one of being there to make the decision for them, rather to help the bulk of them reach a common consensus that results in timely efficient delivery of appropriate assistance to the bulk of the population in a way that fills the gap between immediate post-disaster need and the communities’ recovery capacity.

So what tends to happen is that people coalesce around a common theme or idea, and work together, and then outsiders who come out with an idea that doesn’t fit with that coalesced vision go off on their own, sometimes individually sometimes in sub groups or working groups. There are organisations who come in with a pre-conceived solution in disasters, all the time. For example, the Shelter Cluster (which included approximately 200 NGOs, as well as government and universities) didn’t deal with Domes For The World at all as far as I know. I think they came along to a couple of initial shelter meetings, and then weren’t seen again, as they clearly had a preconceived idea of what was the “right” thing to do… and hence went and did it. The fact that the local government expressly requested the INGO community to NOT build permanent housing, or the fact that dome structures simply don’t exist in local culture, or say the request by the Sultan that INGOs use roof tiles to preserve the architectural and aesthetic traditions of the area … none of these things deterred then from their clear mission to build domes.

Kim: When people talk about achieving global sustainability, they often talk about needing social change, or socio-ecological change processes. It seems like there’s a process of social change going on within a Cluster to try to achieve shared goals.

Dave: The thing that leaps to mind when I hear those words is that in a disaster our job isn’t to change the way people think. But lot of people come in thinking it is. It is our job to promote sustainable, durable and culturally appropriate solutions in harmony with the desires of the local population…

Kim: So as a Cluster, you might actually be trying to change the path of organisations to come to a point of agreement to not change communities’ own path of recovery?

Dave: One of the things that is great about the Cluster system is that it’s actually not a dictatorial system, it’s a participatory system. So people can choose to participate or not. And some choose not to. It means you get diversity, and diversity by nature will mean that some of it is not so good and some of it is brilliant. What you’re trying to do is raise the bar of the average.

I’m always one to quote Noam Chomsky who said “you know you have freedom of speech when you don’t like what you hear”. I want to work in a system that allows the diversity for organizations like Dome For The World to do what they believe in, as I think I have said, I don’t agree with their choice but then I don’t have to.

When there is just too little assistance to go around, then often any help is better than none, but that said and done, it is still not an excuse to not strive to do things better and I believe we can do better than thrusting strange ‘Teletubby” villages on needy populations to fulfill our own agendas, sorry if that sounds hard.

Kim: Dave, thank you very much for your time.

© Kim Williamson 2008