Post-tsunami Urban Recovery Process and Current Conditions in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia

Abstract

Each country damaged by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami adopted individual recovery planning strategies according to the need for resettling victims after the disaster. It is important to accumulate records of the different recovery processes with comparative studies, and to clarify the relationship between each post-disaster recovery process and strategy in discussions concerning future post-disaster recovery initiatives. However, it is difficult to compare recovery phenomena because of the different social, religious, political, or economic context in each country.

To remove the contextual bias from comparisons, a method for generating a recovery curve, which is developed using a building construction dataset, was proposed as a quantitative measure in previous studies by the author. This chapter first outlines the social contexts and the recovery policy and planning conducted in three countries, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia, that were seriously damaged by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Recovery curves are subsequently developed based on the building construction dataset of temporary and permanent housing, and then followed by a quantitative comparison. The result of the comparison indicates that the swiftest recovery was in Sri Lanka, and the slowest was in Indonesia. Finally, the physical conditions of areas affected by the tsunami as of 2012 are reported.