Introduction

After a devastating disaster, the affected area loses all functions that are necessary for people to sustain their lives. One of the most important functions to recover is housing, which serves as a basis for human living and community. That is why research about housing recovery is especially important. Here, the term ‘housing recovery’ is used rather than ‘house’ or ‘reconstruction’. ‘House’ is physical structure, but ‘housing’ includes the system of providing houses for people and the process of human living in the house within the surrounding community. ‘Recovery’ of housing contains the meaning not only of ‘reconstruction’ as an action, but also of ‘rebuilding’ as a decision-making and reconstruction process.

Smith and Wenger (2006, p 237) define sustainable disaster recovery as ‘the differential process of restoring, rebuilding, and reshaping the physical, social, economic, and natural environment through pre-event planning and post-event actions’. Disaster recovery is a process – neither a goal nor consequence. Here, ‘disaster recovery’ is defined as the process of restoring survivors’ living and enhancing the sustainability and resilience of the built environment. The former often tends to fall into the category of ‘put “it” back in place’, and the latter falls into ‘build “it” back better’. ‘It’ includes human living, community, housing and jobs for people, and industry, economy and urban landscape for cities. The perspective of this chapter and expected means of housing recovery includes not only social welfare policy, such as providing housing for those who became homeless after disaster and encouraging people to reconstruct their housing, but also spatial planning for survivors’ housing reconstruction and urban infrastructure. It includes two dimensions: one is people-centred (Office of Communications and Partnerships Bureau United Nations Development Program, 2011) and the other is the spatial planning perspective. Basically, the people-centred focus is on human settlement, but the perspective extends over the built environment. Planning for the built environment following disaster has to pay attention to the spatial gradualness and time axis in order to contribute not only to quick housing reconstruction for survivors, but also to a long-term sustainable community and urban built environment for future generations.