Participation as inhabitation: designer-citizens negotiating postdisaster housing reconstruction

The urgency, complexity, and uncertainty that distinguish postdisaster housing reconstruction produce a debate concerning the effectiveness of command-and-control methods versus participatory approaches. Participatory planning models of disaster recovery construct humans as sociopolitical subjects who possess local knowledge needed by built environment practitioners to effectively design and restore settlements. However, these models tend to overlook the role of non-human agents (e.g., materials and everyday household items) in how reconstruction site inhabitants improvise upon their dwelling, in order to negotiate the regimes of citizenship that ground experiences of disaster. Consequently, this ethnographic study of and with a small island fisherfolk community aims to develop an ecological view of citizen participation that emphasises the 'livingness' of architecture for postdisaster housing reconstruction  Specifically, this research views participation as a mode of inhabitation in which designer-citizens merge with social, political, material, and environmental forces to continue living through catastrophe. The broader aim is to illuminate the relationality of postdisaster housing reconstruction through contribution to theory at the junctures of anthropology, citizenship, and design, and by extension, to understand how the “policy-practice defect” in disaster management can be better addressed by built environment practitioners.