Designing to Heal: Planning and Urban Design Response to Disaster and Conflict

By Jenny Donovan

Designing to Heal explores what happens to communities that have suffered disasters, either natural or man-made, and what planners and urban designers can do to give the affected communities the best possible chance of recovery. It examines the relationship that people have with their surroundings and the profound disruption to people's lives that can occur when that relationship is violently changed; when the familiar settings for their lives are destroyed and family, friends and neighbours are displaced, incapacitated or killed.

The book offers a model of the healing process, outlining the emotional journey that people go on as they struggle to rebuild their lives. It outlines the characteristics of the built environment that may facilitate people to travel as smoothly as possible down this road to recovery and suggests elements of the design process that can help achieve this goal. Designing to Heal highlights the importance of thinking about urban design as a way of nurturing hope and creating the optimal conditions to achieve social objectives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780643106482

Book preview

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Introduction

The physical and emotional aftermath of disasters can echo through people’s lives, months, years, even generations after the event. Disasters destroy not only things and people but also the bonds between them, unravelling the fabric of community. This book deals with one small but critical aspect of the disaster response: ensuring that the ‘new’ spaces and buildings – built for and with the survivors – will provide those survivors with the optimal conditions to overcome their loss and rebuild their lives.

The destruction or denial of the settings for people to meet their needs presents serious challenges. Places that are critical to our wellbeing such as houses, places of employment, education, socialisation and health care, and sites of spiritual or emotional value are destroyed or cannot be occupied. Further, logistics fail as roads, rail, seaports or airports are put out of action and the means of keeping them going is disrupted.

At a personal level, people lose the reassurance of knowing what their surroundings allow them to do. The familiar and valued settings that the survivors had built up to meet their needs, often over many generations, may be lost – as too may the symbols of a life’s achievements. The survivors will be involuntarily projected into a new and unfamiliar relationship with their surroundings and will see those surroundings with new eyes, coloured by their experience of the disaster. Fond memories and other positive associations that people have with particular places may be overlaid with negative associations of loss and fear.

Many of the people who had critical skills or insights are unavailable to participate in the rebuilding process because they are dead, incapacitated (emotionally or physically) or displaced. Furthermore, the people to whom survivors would usually look for support – parents, partners or close friends – may be missing or dead and, if they have survived, their ability to offer support will be diminished as they too will be going through their own journey of grief and recovery. As Daryl Taylor, a survivor of the Victorian bushfires puts it, his ‘network of support was hollowed out by the disaster’ (Taylor 2009).

These factors diminish the survivors’ ability to look after their shared surroundings. This in turn can erode the ability of those surroundings to meet the needs of its inhabitants as ‘people’ and ‘place’ get locked into a vicious cycle of decline, with each acting negatively upon the other.

How individuals respond to this new world is likely to vary hugely. Denied familiar opportunities to meet their needs and overwhelmed by what has happened to them, some people will feel cut adrift and ill equipped to overcome their loss, rebuild, thrive and fulfil their potential. Others will find reserves of energy and ingenuity they never knew they had. Some people will oscillate between these two extremes. Some people will find the stress of the disaster and its aftermath overwhelms them, damaging their ‘emotional wiring’. This can taint every aspect of their lives, affecting their potential to be partners, friends and parents, their ability to learn, to play, to care, to make a living and to engage with other people. Some may find their previously held certainties (such as faith) will be shaken and for others they will be strengthened. Some people will become withdrawn, others may become more driven. People may turn to alcohol and drugs or they may do none of the above.

People’s ability to go through the healing process will vary depending on their experience of the disaster, that of the people they are close to, their past experience of grief and their own coping mechanisms. One of the implications of this is that, although a community may have shared a single disaster, the paths they individually travel after that point will diverge as each goes on their own personal journey of recovery. As a result, designing places to help the people who will live, work or visit them to overcome their trauma is made more difficult when the exact nature and impact of that trauma varies from person to person.

Consequently when planners and urban designers are asked to participate in helping people rebuild their communities, they are intervening in a very sensitive set of circumstances, often quite different to those encountered in conventional planning processes.

Rebuilding projects can inadvertently hinder the recovery by meeting the immediate post-disaster challenges in a way that diminishes future choices and opportunities. Interventions can warp surviving social structures by creating places that people feel don’t belong to them and create a new and unfamiliar landscape of authority, alien to local people. This can contribute to a sense of dis-empowerment as local communities no longer feel in control of their own destiny, their wisdom and insights are unvalued, and their custodians disregarded.

Furthermore, some well-meant interventions have been inappropriate, contradictory and occasionally downright dangerous (Wisner 2009). Their impact on the community can inadvertently make the effect of the disaster linger longer than might otherwise have been the case. Such communities will find that their members’ individual and collective potential is compromised as health, personal, emotional and social problems go unresolved. Furthermore, diminished economic capacity can deny them opportunities they may otherwise have had, had the disaster not occurred or their rebuilt surroundings had been planned and built differently.

Despite this, a recurring theme in many of the stories of recovery is people’s underlying resilience and humanity. Disasters inspire people to incredible feats, releasing immense energy, inspiring innovation, compassion and civic-mindedness and enabling people to solve their own problems and reforge their community bonds in new – and often stronger – ways.

If you imagine a community as a living being and a disaster is a wound to that being, the way we rebuild places can be compared with the way the wound heals. If managed well, the healing results in a small scar, the legacy of the wound is minimised, it no longer causes pain, and the scar is not disfiguring or debilitating. It may even help the being grow stronger, offering life experiences that may serve that being well in future. If managed poorly, the scar may never heal properly and will leave a disfiguring mark, limiting potential to move and causing debilitating pain.

About this book

The seed that was to grow into this book was planted in the late 1990s. I was working as an urban designer in Sydney for a large multi-disciplinary practice. Some colleagues of the time were working on a project to redevelop the site of the former Children’s Hospital in Camperdown. Jon Pizey, a senior architect on the project, recounted how in visiting the then derelict hospital he had come across a little cluster of wreaths, notes and children’s toys in an abandoned ward of echoes and peeling paint. This little informal shrine to some child who had died there spoke eloquently of the great emotional significance that place had for the parents as the focus for suffering and a reminder of their child. Jon made the suggestion to the developer to incorporate a memorial garden – a place of quiet contemplation for the incoming community and a point of continuity for those people for whom the hospital was a locus of profoundly important memories. The plan was at an early stage and, with the developer’s agreement, a memorial garden was built as part of the ‘City Quarter’ development (Figure 1.1).

This inspired me to think about the significance that ‘place’ has, to ponder how emotions echo through spaces and to consider how the design of people’s surroundings can offer them respite from their pain and help them recover. It seemed to me that what places mean to people is a real and important thing for designers to think about and that designers should respond to this every bit as much as they respond to the physical landscape of buildings and spaces when going through the design process.

Figure 1.1 ‘City Quarter’ memorial garden, Sydney.

This book makes no judgement on the circumstances that led to the disasters it explores. It is not about apportioning blame; rather it is about understanding what can be done to overcome their impact and build the community’s resilience to further disasters. Nor does this book seek to outline the history of the disasters covered, other than is necessary to illuminate the context within which the stories of recovery have occurred. The observations are written as an outsider and as a professional urban designer, looking at how well interventions have allowed people to get on with their lives and be supported by their surroundings. It is recognised that the background to each conflict or natural disaster is hugely different, as are the communities afflicted and, as such, the observations made in this book are put forward with corresponding qualification.

Designing to Heal is about applying the urban designers’ skill set to work with survivors to help them facilitate changes on the ground and in people’s hearts and minds. It seeks to foster the optimal circumstances to generate and sustain hope in communities affected by disasters and ensure places are ‘hard wired’ to be responsive to the process of recovery. This book does not claim to provide a definitive way of guaranteeing that a community’s path to recovery will be made smooth. Rather it seeks to provide a pair of spectacles through which disasters can be looked at and plans generated with the survivors to help them create human habitat – the optimal conditions for people to thrive.

Human habitat

At the heart of this book is a belief that the relationship between people and place matters. ‘People don’t just create things, they react to them’ (De Haan 2005). The way we form our urban areas, the spaces they enclose and the values they embody have a profound effect on the quality of people’s lives. ‘We shape our cities, and afterwards our cities shape us’, to paraphrase Winston Churchill (1941).

Urban design is one of the factors shaping our towns and cities and it influences the degree to which those places can help us to meet our many and varied needs. Such needs vary from person to person, but they are likely to include many if not all of the following needs: to find shelter; to access healthy, safe, culturally appropriate food; to find meaningful employment; to access health care and education; to practice faith; to participate in cultural activities; to forge and cultivate friendships; and to experience nature. Typically each of these needs has a particular setting associated with it – buildings or spaces with qualities that allow people to meet one or more of these needs. When a settlement, or part of a settlement, fails to provide the settings to meet those needs, or those settings are inaccessible, either by distance or by time (because we have depleted the resources needed to make them work), then the people who live there might find their needs will go unmet. This places in the hands of urban designers a huge responsibility and privilege to ensure we create places that offer everyone equitable access to the opportunities of their surroundings. In other words ‘no-one should be disadvantaged by their surroundings’ (Social Exclusion Unit 2001).

This is not to say that someone’s fate is sealed and their potential in life inescapably compromised if they live in sub-optimal conditions. People always have, and always will, overcome adversity to fulfil their potential and make great contributions to their community and society, irrespective of the quality of their surroundings. Designing to Heal merely tries to ensure people’s surroundings are not part of the problem as illustrated in Figure 1.2.

The ‘plans for recovery’ covered in this book

There are many different stories to be told about disasters and how urban designers and planners are called upon to help to answer questions they raise. This book seeks to cast some light on a few of these stories. It seeks to explain the context within which particular projects were undertaken, the impact of the disaster in physical and human terms, the difficulties faced by the survivors and how or if the projects covered have helped them overcome their trauma.

The stories themselves cover a variety of different contexts and locations on five continents. They were not selected through scientific sieving, but rather they are the stories of recovery on which I have worked or studied. Like all personal stories, the reasons why I became interested in these places relates to my circumstances and opportunity at the time.

Figure 1.2. The impact of people’s surroundings on their ability to thrive (image reproduced by kind permission of David Lock Associates).

However, the stories selected share two key features in common:

• The disasters disrupted the social fabric of the affected communities.

• Planning and urban design responses were made to try and overcome the effects of that disaster on that community.

Some of the disasters that made news headlines at the time of writing are not documented simply because they were still too raw and the recovery was still in an early stage or had not yet occurred. For this reason, the Queensland and Victorian floods in Australia in 2010–2011, the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand in 2010–2011 and the Sendai earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 are not covered as stories of recovery. Instead, observations are drawn from these and other events to understand what it must be like to go through a disaster and suffer the trauma of losing some or all of the supports that provide the foundations for people’s lives.

Process and product

The insights offered by these ‘plans for recovery’ are used to make some observations about how urban designers can play a part in ensuring places nurture their inhabiting communities. These conclusions relate to the process of design (how we can design to respond to disasters) and the product of design (what we design and build). The ‘process conclusions’ address the steps along the way: who should be involved; how they can be sensitively engaged; and how can we make the process itself therapeutic and an agency of hope by offering people a shared ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. The ‘product conclusions’ outline some examples of design characteristics that may equip people to undertake activities and experience things that facilitate their journey to recovery and enhance their quality of life. They also stress that different responses are needed at different times and that it is important to consider the legacy of interventions to ensure they are still relevant as needs change.

The relationship between people and place

The way we look at our surroundings is influenced by the needs we call on those surroundings to meet (Porteous 1977). The needs that we are aware of at any particular time will vary according to our economic/social circumstances; our age, gender, tastes, preferences, cultural values and experiences; how tired, well/unwell, hungry, thirsty we are; what the weather is like and what the time of day is, as well as the physical characteristics of those surroundings. As some of these variables change, so to do our needs and priorities and the conclusions we draw about our surroundings (Porteous 1990).

If it is raining shelter is important, if you are tired a place to rest will be a high priority, if you are hungry finding food will be the focus of your attention. If your doctor advises you to walk more you might suddenly interpret your surroundings in terms of whether they make walking a realistic option or not. In this new light, a place is good if it enables you to walk but bad if it doesn’t.

A park might be seen as a desirable place to be in daytime because it supports people to walk but at night it might be seen as dangerous. It will have the same environmental qualities day and night but fear is likely to have a much greater influence on people’s choices at night.

In economic terms, settlements are concentrations of labour and capital bound together by accepted and expected behaviours that give their inhabitants reasonable confidence in how other people will act and how they can cooperate. The industrial and information revolutions have allowed us to build more complex systems that in turn allow us to play increasingly specialised roles in society, enabling city dwellers to develop highly mediated relationships with their surroundings. In the developed and urbanised world we tend to meet our needs in specialised settings (e.g. schools and shops) built for us by other people, or brought to us on specialised infrastructure (roads, pipes and power lines), operated by specialists unknown to us. An army of unseen workers keeps our surroundings clean, ensures that water, food and electricity can get to us, and that our waste is taken away.

Most of us exercise our interest in our wider surroundings in a sophisticated and highly mediated way, via a democratic process and specialists (e.g. planners and engineers) whose role it is to make decisions that reflect the communities agreed priorities. These provide ‘a level playing field’ and an understood framework for the private sector to find opportunities to meet needs/demands and extract surplus.

In normal circumstances this infrastructure is kept going through taxes and a government bureaucracy. This means we don’t have to think too much about these things. Most people also contribute directly to making places good places to be through their work and/or by participating in society. Going about their day-to-day business they look out for neighbours, say hello to people they recognise, help passers-by, offer directions to people who look like they are lost, participate in clubs and societies or volunteer time for a wide variety of civic, social, community, sporting or religious groups. In this way they provide unspoken reassurance to the other people with whom they share their surroundings that if something happens to them other people are there to help.

We are more likely to participate in society when we live among surroundings that have characteristics that we interpret as making us feel safe and reassured about the opportunities it offers us and the likely behaviour of the people with whom we share our surroundings. Even though we probably don’t know them all personally, we usually don’t worry about their likely range of behaviours when we come across them.

This reassurance is built up incrementally and is based on experience: ‘the trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts’ (Jacobs 1993). This trust helps to create the circumstances for people to contribute to their surroundings. For example, we are more likely to invest time and effort in creating beautiful front gardens that passers-by can enjoy when we are not worried they will be vandalised (Figure 1.3).

In normal circumstances, every proposed building, road, park, and so on is thought about and discussed, considered against planning laws and in light of economic trends, changing tastes and technological potential. The cities so produced are agglomerations of places we may like or dislike, but either way they tend to fall within our understanding of what our city is. Typically we know what we will be able to do in those spaces and the potential opportunities they offer us. We can confidently predict the changes that individual interventions can make to our lives, even if sometimes we are wrong. We come to know our surroundings through experience and relatively low-risk experiment, building up fond memories of the places we like and learning to avoid the places we don’t, and find coping mechanisms or else learn to minimise our time within them.

When a disaster strikes these certainties are lost and the long chain of connections are broken, setting people unfamiliar and discomforting challenges.

Providing for human habitat

What constitutes human needs and theories about how we perceive and prioritise them is a contested area; however, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow provided a major contribution to the field in his paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ (1943) and book Motivation and Personality (1954). This approach and its focus on supporting people to fulfil their potential are reflected in this book.

Figure 1.3. Investments made by individuals in their shared surroundings benefit everyone, and are made possible because property owners feel confident that their efforts will not be stolen or vandalised.

According to Maslow, an individual’s needs are likely to be varied and constantly changing in response to environmental and physiological stimuli. He suggested that human needs are similar to instincts and play a major role in motivating behaviour. Maslow emphasised that in order for an individual to develop as a person and achieve their potential – a process he called ‘self-actualisation’ – a person had to first fulfil their basic physiological and material needs. Failure to meet lower order needs stifles the ability of individuals to meet higher order needs.

Maslow’s hierarchy is usually illustrated as a pyramid (Figure 1.4). The foundations of the pyramid are made up of our most basic needs, while the higher level, more complex needs are located at the top of the pyramid. As people progress up the pyramid, their perceptions of needs become less immediate and increasingly filtered through their psyche and relate to their emotional and social condition.

These needs fall into two categories: the bottom three levels are deficiency needs that a person becomes aware of when they are not met, such as hunger and thirst. Maslow’s hierarchy suggests we are motivated to satisfy these basic needs in order to avoid unpleasant feelings or consequences that will distract a person from meeting higher order needs. The other levels represent growth needs. These do not stem from a lack of something but rather from a desire to set and meet challenges and grow as a person.

Figure 1.4. Maslow’s pyramid of needs (adapted from Maslow 1943; image sourced from www.colinchristianson.com )

Physiological needs

Physiological needs form the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy. These serve basic functions that are vital to survival, such as the need for water, air and food. Without these, life is threatened. Maslow believed that these are the most basic and instinctive needs in the hierarchy because all others are secondary until these physiological needs are met.

Security needs

These include needs for safety and security. Security needs are important for survival, but they are not as demanding as the physiological needs. They tend to have a more intellectual component, in that we are typically aware of them when we think of them or see/hear something we have learnt to associate with danger. Examples of security needs include a desire for steady employment, health care and a safe neighbourhood.

Social needs

Social needs relate to our ability to forge connections with others and develop a sense of belonging. They include needs for involvement with others – to love and be loved – and to offer and receive affection and share values. Maslow considered that these become more pressing motivations once physiological and security needs are met. The ability to make relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfil this need, as does involvement in social, community or faith groups.

Esteem needs

Esteem is the first growth need and becomes a more important motivation once the first three needs have been satisfied. Esteem needs might be seen as our ability to live lives congruent with our values. These include the need for self-esteem, personal worth, social recognition and achievement that is recognised by others.

Self-actualising needs

This is the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When all the other groups of needs have been met to the satisfaction of the individual, the person is in the optimal position to achieve their potential, or self-actualisation as Maslow called it. Self-actualising people are self-aware, understand their latent talents and limitations, and are interested in fulfilling their potential.

The focus on cities

For the first time in history the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas (United Nations 2005). Even among those who aren’t urban dwellers, there can be few people who would not recognise themselves as being in the hinterland of an urban area that they look to for culture, technology, health care, education and as the seat of local power. Consequently, towns and cities play critical roles in people’s lives and are the focus for the services and opportunities upon which we nearly all depend.

Urban design

Design is simply creative problem solving. According to the Urban Design Group, urban design is ‘the process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages. It is the art of making places’ (Urban Design group website, n.d.). The same article goes on to say ‘Urban design appeals to people who are interested in more than just the design of a single building or the interests of a single user. What gets urban designers out of bed in the morning is the challenge of creating a place that will be used and enjoyed by a wide range of different people for different purposes, not only now but in years to come’.

Implied in this definition is a view that it is the outcomes of what gets designed – the opportunities a place provides the people who experience it – that should be the focus of our attention, rather than the output –the buildings and spaces themselves. Of course, the output and all the quantitative things that go with that – the size, shape, floor space, materials and species selection, and so on – are also critical, and need to be right, but they do not define the end of an urban designer’s responsibilities. They are merely a means to an end, framing opportunities for the people who will visit, live or otherwise share the space, building or precinct. Good urban design is about understanding and optimising the opportunities that these factors and others collectively facilitate for all present and future users.

Urban design quality and the choices people make

In endowing a place with quality, urban designers frame the experiences people have there, what they can do and by extension the needs they can meet within that environment. For example, in the context of the design of residential areas, there is a significant body of evidence that suggests that committing to a high standard of neighbourhood design – incorporating a mix of land uses such as local shops, services, schools and open spaces and residential densities high enough to ensure most people live within walking distance of these key destinations (among other things) – can increase people’s propensity to undertake physical activity and thereby improve health outcomes (Lake and Townshend 2006). Without these design characteristics, activity is less well supported and good health is something that happens despite, and not because of, people’s surroundings.

To further illustrate the impact that the quality of the environment has on people’s choices, in the two scenarios in Figure 1.5 the output could be argued to be the same: the same width of footpath passing along the same alignment and gradient. However, the outcome is very different. In the scenario on the left, the experience of passing through that environment is more likely to be perceived as pleasant and safe and the effort and emotional cost of walking through that space is unlikely to deter people from getting to whatever is at the far end of the path. However, in the scenario on the right, the emotional cost is likely to be significant and is more likely to make people feel deterred from whatever is at the end of the path, particularly at night or if they are female, very young or old.

There are many reasons for this, some of which will be touched on in this book, but the central point is that this book has been written from the perspective of the person walking down that path. It suggests an agenda for design that puts that person at the centre of urban design considerations. It is my hope that this is compatible with the vision of the developer and the desire of the designer to express him or herself, but the core test the book asks of anything we build in other people’s shared surroundings is: is it likely to help or hinder those people from doing the things they need to do and go to the places they need to go, so they can enjoy the opportunities necessary to meet their needs and fulfil their potential? If the development diminishes their ability to look after themselves or their surroundings, exposes them to greater risks or otherwise diminishes opportunities to enjoy basic health and wellbeing, then it is likely to hinder people from fulfilling their potential. Of course, there may be good reasons for developments that do this because of some other benefit – typically economic or social – that the development may realise, but if the designer identifies that there will be losers then this book invites them and other decision makers to think about whether that intervention is justified or might be amended.

Figure 1.5. Identical outputs (paths of same width, alignment, gradient, materials, etc.) but very different outcomes in terms of encouraging walking.

Understanding disasters

Disasters take from people the things they hold dear and require them to come to terms with dramatically changed lives. People may lose physical things, such as friends or family members, pets, houses or other valued possessions, or they might lose conceptual things such as trust and security. Disasters are multi-faceted and their impacts will not be constrained within a single aspect of an individuals or a community’s life. They have physical, community and individual dimensions.

Emergency Management Australia (EMA) provides many valuable insights into disasters. One of the definitions they offer of disasters is: ‘A serious disruption to community life which threatens or causes death or injury in that community and/or damage to property which is beyond the day-to-day capacity of the prescribed statutory authorities and which requires special mobilisation and organisation of resources other than those normally available to those authorities’ (Attorney General’s Department, n.d.). This suggests that disasters place people in unfamiliar situations and at the same time diminish their ability to do something about it. Implicit within this definition is recognition that disasters create a gap between the size of the challenges people face and the locally available and familiar tools to meet those challenges (Figure 1.6). This book looks into this gap. It seeks to shed some light on how urban designers and planners can help communities to play a part in filling that gap themselves and overcoming their own difficulties.

Figure 1.6. Meeting needs before and after disasters.

Disasters can be caused by:

Nature: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, drought and floods are all examples of natural disasters.

Accidental human interventions: for example, many landslides and some resource depletion, such as reductions in water supply, are identifiable inadvertent effects of human interventions.

Deliberate human interventions (i.e. conflict): when one group seeks to destroy or appropriate what another group has or destroy that community itself. These can take the form of wars, undeclared conflicts or terrorism, or be the result of economic or political sanctions.

Complex causes: disasters that owe their origin to more than one cause, such as the 2011 Japanese earthquake, which caused a tsunami, and where both the earthquake and tsunami caused a nuclear disaster.

In reality, the number and complexity of variables that are at play leave a gap in our understanding of cause and effect that often make it difficult to attribute a disaster to a particular cause, blurring the boundaries between categories. When droughts, bushfires, heatwaves and landslides occur, are they entirely natural phenomena or are they due to climate change and have a human, albeit indirect, and accidental cause? When we make choices to travel from A to B in a car, burn fossil fuels to keep ourselves fed and comfortable and make all the things we consume, have we somehow nudged nature in a way that is reflected in disasters somewhere else in the world? Are the true costs of our lifestyles being paid by someone else, somewhere else or even those not yet born?

This book doesn’t set out to answer these questions but does seek to outline how we can build to facilitate resilience to their impacts, whatever the cause, recognising the effects of disasters are influenced by the choices we make about how we build. These choices may be reduced or made worse by how we respond to them and how we have prepared for them. ‘Natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes or hurricanes do not necessarily produce disastrous effects. A natural hazard becomes disastrous when human systems fail to cope with its social, economic and physical impacts’ (United Nations Habitat 2010).

‘Events’ and ‘situations’

Imagine two earthquakes occur, one in an uninhabited desert and one in