Post Disaster Housing Management for Sustainable Urban Development: A Review

Introduction

Natural disasters are the complex dynamics of unfavorable events that occur completely beyond the human control and human interventions often indirectly make it worse. Some hazards are known to be more prevalent such as windstorms, floods, earthquakes, volcano, droughts and extreme temperature. Housing is a basic need of human being and the importance of housing is universally accepted from the dawn of history. Since past few decades the poverty of urban dwellers has been increasing, mostly in low and middle-income nations and for that the housing of those countries is of poor quality, overcrowded and has lack of provisions for the basic infrastructure and services which should protect them from environmental health hazards and help prevent disasters (IFRCCS 2010). Poor quality or substandard housing is more vulnerable and during the catastrophe these substandard houses are easily damaged and aggravating the problem of accommodation in those areas. So now to live a safe life it is necessary to protect houses from disaster for sustainable development. The objectives of the study are to make a depth literature research on natural disaster and its effects on settlements, the housing policies and practices in disaster prone areas and to highlight the significance of disaster housing on sustainable development in long term. In order to bring the meaningful outcomes of this paper, the research work has been done in two phases. Initially secondary data and information has been collected by reviewing of the literature from various sources as journal papers, publications by the government, non-government organizations and news articles on natural disaster. In the second step, the guidelines of disaster management and sustainable disaster housing with an example of different countries are explored with the help of reports of different organizations of the United Nations, government and non-government organizations of the various countries. Finally, a compilation of literature survey has been done to draw the meaning of the study.