The 8th October 2005 Kashmir Earthquake was one the largest earthquakes in Northern Pakistan in its recorded history. It caused an unprecedented level of damage and destruction in Pakistan Administered Kashmir (PAK) and the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP). It damaged or collapsed more than 0.6 million buildings - leaving 3.5 million people shelter less as winter approached. A large part of the earthquake-affected area is difficult to access and highly snow-prone, with rugged terrain and scattered settlements. It posed unique challenges and efforts on a massive-scale for reconstruction. For residential buildings, the Pakistan government adopted a house-owner driven approach. The reconstruction policy stated that the government and other agencies would provide equal technical assistance and subsidy to each family, without differentiating between who lost what. To increase capacity in earthquake-resistant construction, large-scale training of artisans, technicians, engineers, and community mobilisers has been conducted. Campaigns to “build back better” have raised awareness in the communities. Local Housing Reconstruction Centres have been established for training, advice, and dissemination of earthquake-resistant technology. This decentralised approach has helped in achieving reconstruction smoothly. This paper will present the authors’ first-hand experience in the reconstruction effort, and the opportunities and unique challenges faced.
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Graham Saunders, a prolific peer reviewer for and a very good friend of Disasters, died on 6 November 2017. He leaves in place the architecture of a humanitarian shelter sector that he developed and promoted over the past 20 years. His contribution is broad in scope, including institutional mechanisms for coordination and collaboration and a broader understanding of the significance of shelter for survival and recovery in crises.In the messy world of shelter, housing, and settlements, Graham worked tirelessly to develop coherence and shared principles. He communicated the significance of where and how people live, to donors, governments, and the media, as well as to the people involved in planning and implementing shelter programmes.Graham was committed to learning, and to mentoring young, new, and local people. He was dedicated to research, to sharing knowledge, to improving practice. He was sceptical of innovation for its own sake, of supply-driven solutions, and of high-cost 'best practice'.While those around him might have been overwhelmed by the acute and complex demands, Graham could always be relied upon to be strategic and positive in finding solutions and was boundless in his energy to implement them. His passionate enthusiasm, incisive intellect, and warm sense of humour were applied to any undertaking.Born in London in 1961, Graham described his significant early influences in Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working after Disaster: Neither of my parents had a professional background, although my father was an optical craftsman and ingrained in me an interest in how things are made and the skills, tools, time and application required. I was also certainly aware that the world wasn't necessarily an equal place, and that hardships could be experienced by family and friends as well as those in the headline news. My mother grew up in London during the Second World War, in the latter stages of which her home was bombed and she had to be dug out of the rubble. She was effectively an internally displaced person for the remainder of the war and having lost everything, was dependent on relief assistance to provide her and her family with clothing and temporary shelter (Charlesworth, 2014, pp. 157-172).
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