Lesson Learned in Post-Disaster Reconstruction Project

Five Case Studies of Indigenous Settlements after the 2009 Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan

Abstract

Global warming and climate change have been intensifying the severity of disasters worldwide. Disasters not only cause loss of human lives and affect the economy; they also have a huge impact on houses located in areas prone to natural calamities. Therefore, in recent years, governments have been emphasizing post-disaster reconstruction, especially in countries that see frequent disasters. From the Ji-ji earthquake in 1999, which led to the launch of large-scale post-disaster reconstruction, to Typhoon Morakot in 2009, the Taiwanese government has attached great importance to the formulation of post-disaster reconstruction policies. However, different from the Ji-ji earthquake, 73% of the disaster victims of Typhoon Morakot were the indigenous population, which made this unique post-disaster reconstruction (PDR) project unique. Nonetheless, the indigenous context-based PDR project still had little discussion.

Therefore, this study arranged the documentaries on Typhoon Morakot post disaster reconstruction and the interview record of the residents to clarify: 1) understand the main contents and characteristics of the reconstruction policy after Typhoon Morakot 2) clarify residents' evaluation of the reconstruction policy, and 3) proposed some suggestions based on this case study.

The research mythologies here were literature surveys and interviews to examine the problems in the policy and clarify the main issues and challenges in the project. For the literature survey, the main content and characteristics of the policy after Typhoon Morakot were analyzed by researching government documents related to the reconstruction plans released by official and private reconstruction agencies. For the interviews, this study selected interviewees from five relocated settlements—in Pingtung and Taitung counties in southern Taiwan—affected by the disaster.

As per the findings, the project's main issues and challenges were: 1) inadequate permanent housing space planning, 2) NGO domination and patchy housing design scheme, 3) substandard construction, 4) ignorance of the social context, and 5) insufficient resident participation. The results show that there was much room for improvement in Taiwan's post-disaster reconstruction policy. Thus, this research provided suggestions to enhance future discussion and post-disaster project planning.