Dr Renate U Carius is a casual academic whose research focuses on design and post disaster recovery and reconstruction. She has extensive experience working with communities in disaster reconstruction in Rasuwa District, Nepal. She is studio lead of Social Agency, Master of Architecture at UNSW in Sydney, Australia.
Storm clouds mingle with smoke from the funeral pyre burning in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. People displaced by last week’s disaster walk some 72 kilometres over mountainous terrain from the Trisuli River area to Kathmandu to mourn.
According to Hindu legend, Lord Shiva thrust his trident into the Himalaya at Gosaikunda, creating water springs to soothe his throat after consuming poison. On another school-day morning, a catastrophic glacier collapse high in the Himalaya, and the resultant outflow of meltwater and debris, unleashed a deadly cataclysm down the Lende Khola-Trisuli-Narayani river system. Its force wiped out roads and bridges, schools and shops, whole market towns — everything in its way. UNICEF estimates that more than 65,000 people, including around 22,100 children, are affected by the disaster, with thousands still unaccounted for as people dig by hand through the mud.
For centuries, communities have lived alongside the Trisuli River. Now, with tons of mud and debris hardening its edges and riparian zones, unknown challenges lie ahead. Reimagining recovery and reconstruction will be a difficult undertaking, with climate change and questions of resettlement — both of which bear on human vulnerability — driving hard questions: Is it possible to rebuild on the river, and if so, how?
What emerges from disaster is enforced change: personal tragedy, displacement, lost livelihoods, a lack of basic means of survival and shelter. Accounts from past disasters suggest that people experience an altered state of consciousness in the aftermath, one that requires care to shield the vulnerable from a second wave of marginalisation. The recovery and reconstruction process will be long and iterative, played out by people painfully rebuilding their lives, livelihoods, and the built and natural environments around them. The way these are designed, rebuilt and maintained matters.
How designers and architects engage with people through recovery and reconstruction has changed since the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. The idea of putting people at the centre of these processes — listening, observing, caring, then carefully responding — is not new, but it is worth restating. The power of this approach often goes unnoticed, yet it matters greatly to the worst-affected people after a disaster. For the design practitioner, it means navigating human and technical skills in equal measure.
The social dimensions of vulnerability are as much a part of a disaster as the loss of the physical built environment. Consider the story of a father and son who, one day after the disaster, travelled home to Rasuwa District, making their way over arduous terrain to where the market town of Betrawati once stood. For the father, childhood memories flooded back: walking barefoot from his village to Betrawati to collect kerosene or cloth for clothing. He thought of the lost Hindu shrines where five generations of his family had been cremated beside the river. His son pointed out where bridges once straddled the river, where his school had stood, where the road lined with the houses of family and friends had once run — now all gone. Their experience shows how people meld place as a physical object with place as memory. The anthropologist Tim Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” captures something similar: the reciprocal relationship people have with buildings and place, in which nature and culture, dwelling and living, are bound together rather than separate.
Smaller, quieter signs of this bond emerge too, often hidden from view, in indirect and modest interactions between people. All the hydroelectric power stations along the river were partially or wholly destroyed, leaving an acute need for basic connectivity. En route, the father and son offered their diesel generator to villagers, giving them a way to reach loved ones — dozens of people charged their phones and ran portable oxygen concentrators off it. The anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista has written that Nepal has a long tradition of aafno manchhe, “one’s own people,” a bond especially strong in rural communities. Now, through similar resourcefulness, local volunteers and aid workers are placing a dozen generators with portable power-distribution units at strategic points in affected communities.
For those who design for recovery, the question is who matters, and how. This calls for human and technical skills together, which can help reduce, and perhaps prevent, future local disasters: better scientific detection and warning systems, stricter building codes and enforcement, and closer engagement with local people that expands their capacity to act and reduces uncertainty in how the built environment is shaped. The architect John F.C. Turner made a similar point about the relationships between people and their surroundings while working on disaster reconstruction in Peru more than 50 years ago. The architect Nabeel Hamdi has described something he calls “intelligent practice” — the collective wisdom of people and organizations who act locally, in ways that can then be applied more broadly. In this disaster, the question of where and how to rebuild remains open, and with it the risk that vulnerability repeats itself. Safety concerns and sound building practices must be weighed against the practical work of reconstructing place, history and memory alongside people who have lost everything. Turner’s subsidiarity principle — what people can do for themselves — sums up the stakes.
It may be worth considering the lessons of Kiruna, Sweden, a mining town undermined by its own mining practices. The Nepal glacier collapse and flood does not carry the same self-inflicted cause as Kiruna’s troubles, but both places are compromised by fundamentally unstable ground. Still, relocating people wholesale is not necessarily the answer either: after the 2015 Nepal earthquake, two camps for people displaced by that disaster were built on the banks of the Trisuli River, directly in the path of the same river that has now flooded again. Minimizing that kind of risk is central to the United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015–2030. The idea of resilience, which favors human-centred solutions in disaster recovery, featured heavily in the response to the 2015 earthquakes. This time, that resilience may be reaching its limits for many — the human toll may be too great to withstand, respond to and recover from.
One week has passed since the Trisuli floods, and attention will soon turn to recovery, when decisions about the future get made. In the weeks ahead, the space between choice and necessity looks likely to keep narrowing.
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