Post Disaster Reconstruction in Rural Areas; Pathology- Guidelines

Summary In recent decades with various natural disasters in urban and rural areas, there have lots of efforts done to reconstruct and make these settlements resistant by urban managers. Apart from the quality of these efforts which is not the main concern of this paper, there is little attention to rural settlements. Unfortunately, there is no serious attention to rural matters and its different aspects are set as simple and superficial ones. Studying the process of post disaster reconstruction of rural settlements shows that there is no enough attention to the principles and criteria of domestic and traditional architecture and physical needs resulted from cultural, social, livelihood, and economic characteristics of rural habitants so new housings are far from their routine life’s needs. It must be considered that rural life and relatively its physical settings, is a complex system that can be very different even from juxtaposed ones. A perfect and complete understanding of rural matters and its complexities should be considered in rural planning process. This understanding is resulted by integration of social, economical and cultural settings. For centuries, Iran has been the arena of natural disasters (earthquake, flood, landslide,…). Among them, earthquake, is the most prevalent and destroyer natural disaster which destructs this country. Furthermore, rural settlements as the basis of the settlement system of the country, form a considerable portion of the settlements and also they are more vulnerable against natural disasters especially earthquake because of their economic limitation, climatic situation, lack of materials and lack of technical attention. By taking these subject to account, a holistic approach is necessary to recognize these settlements to make a situation responsible to the needs of rural habitant when a disaster happens and after that. In this article, at the outset an understanding of the effective factors on forming the rural settlements is pursued to determine the important physical and functional factors in forming the layout of the houses. Then the guidelines for post disaster reconstruction projects have been presented. Analyzing these matters shows that paying attention to domestic and traditional architecture in each region even in each village with studying the effective factors on forming the rural settlements can be leaded to create qualitative spaces that are corresponded to rural habitants’ needs.