Impact of built environment to achieve social satisfaction in post-disaster housing resettlements

Abstract

Many people in different parts of the world are displaced and relocated due to different types of disasters caused each year. Those disasters take thousands of lives and cause unexpected economic crises, environmental losses, property damages and complicated social issues predominantly in developing countries. Among those natural disasters, landslides are known to be one of the most hazardous disasters which is frequently occurring in the hill country, Sri Lanka. Hence, planning of post disaster resettlements is one of the crucial needs when rebuilding the vulnerable communities during disaster resilient programmes conducted by the Sri Lankan government with the help of Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s). Even though extensive research has been done on the subject, Sri Lanka's landslide resettlement programme has fallen short of expectations (Vijekumara, 2015). As an example, Maheshika & Sangasumana (2017) explain that resettlement programs did not adequately satisfy the concerns of the impacted population at Meeriyabedda and there were no conclusions that ensure long term satisfaction of victimized rural communities in these resettlements. As explained by Hidayat & Egbu, (2010), it is impossible to achieve the successful relocation without a well-planned and managed process. Although, SL government has resettled most of the victimized communities, many social researchers have highlighted that needs of the communities were not met even after several years of resettlement programmers. There is a gap between resettlement and social connectivity and achieving community satisfaction. These programs were mainly focusing only on ‘how to relocate?’, rather focusing on the massive impact which can make through the given built environment over long-term satisfaction of a victimized community. Thus, the study aims to investigate the current situation of the selected victimized communities and their social satisfaction over a certain period of time after living within the given built environment. To fulfil the aim of this research, following objectives were proposed such as: to identify the relevant indicators that affect social satisfaction of a community through a comprehensive literature review, to collect the data using selected samples of post disaster resettlements, to analyse the selected data using a mix method and to propose relevant improvements to uplift social satisfaction of selected post disaster resettlements.