De adaptiecapaciteit van Aziazische nederzettingen herbeschouwd. Disaster resilient urbanism in interactie met humanitaire respons.

Recent international policies stress the need to (A) build more sustainable and resilient in order to decrease urban disasters that follow natural hazards and to (B) transcend the humanitarian-development divide [1]. Acknowledging that urban emergencies are increasing, a holistic framework for urban disaster resilience to respond to and prepare for disaster is indispensible (Global Alliance for Urban Crises, 2016a). Urbanism as key discipline in both disaster risk reduction as humanitarianism is only called in recently (Lizarralde et al., 2014; Wamsler, 2014) [2]. Vernacular built environments and socio-cultural adaptations demonstrate great disaster resilience, but, the approach of urbanism as a dynamic process of adaptation and sustainability is lacking (Watson and Zetter, 2016) [3]

The research objective is (A) to contribute to both the implementation (action) as the theoretic background (research) of urban disaster resilience in disaster risk reduction and post-disaster reconstruction and (B) to formulate strategies for context specific humanitarian response.
The research starts by analysing the adaptive capacity of the Asian vernacular built environment. This environment is studied on tissue level and as the outcome of a dynamic interplay between socio-cultural and building practices. It aims to analyse this intertwining of the built and social because of the research hypothesis that a reinterpretation of vernacular hazard coping strategies, both of the built environment as of the socio-cultural traditions can form the basis for (A) a more holistic framework for urban disaster resilience and (B) a context-specific humanitarian response, supporting on-going developments.
What makes the proposed research innovative and challenging is that it investigates the ‘living’ urban vernacular explicitely as ‘built’ resilience strategy and prospects how to upscale and update this ‘built’ resilience strategy for contemporary application.
This will add a strategic dimension to the on-going research and projects on how to approach both disaster risk reduction as (re)construction and improve disaster resilience in urban contexts. This requires knowledge on the adaptation and resilience of vernacular building cultures (architecture and urbanism), on the intertwined socio-cultural practices (cultural anthropology) that support this building culture, and also on the responses of the humanitarian sector. Urbanism, a transdisciplinary discipline by nature, is the indicated medium to interpret the socio-cultural, economic, spatial and humanitarian aspects of disaster resilience over time.
The research will focus on 2 cases Asia for 3 reasons. (1) Humanitarian reports indicate Asia as the most hazard prone continent, suffering the highest amount of urban disasters due to natural hazards (Sanderson and Sharma, 2016). (2) Asia incorporates a paradox of two extreme building cultures. Unprecedented massive (often generic) urban growth on one hand, and strongly rooted vernacular building cultures that demonstrate a high resilience to hazards (Jigyasu, 2008) on the other hand. Though simultaneously present, exchange between both is scarce and exceptional. (3) Highly developed Asian countries (Japan,…) have adapted to the latent and cyclic presence of hazards, and have continuously and actively modernised their hazard coping strategies resulting in a resilient building culture (Shaw et al., 2016)