Who is responsible for the reconstruction? How should the groups who volunteer to reconstruct parts of the city be brought together and organised? And how should the parallel organisations and institutions who work independently act in a way that does not lead to interference? It seems that, before reconstruction work begins, certain groups must be assigned to gather information on the following items: information regarding the survivors; information regarding the buildings; technical information regarding the city; and information regarding the groups, individuals, and organisations who are willing to pay for the costs of the reconstruction. These groups can begin their endeavour after being organised.
Opening: A Tale of Two Earthquakes
A magnitude 6.5 earthquake at 5:28 AM on Friday, 5 Dey 1382 (26 December 2003) reduced Bam to ruins. Two days earlier, the newspaper Hamshahri (3 Dey) had reported an earthquake of similar magnitude in California, in these terms:
"A powerful earthquake has shaken vast areas of the State of California in the United States, leaving casualties and damage in its wake. The tremor, registered at 6.5 on the Richter scale, was the strongest in the region in recent years. It was felt across a wide arc from Los Angeles to San Francisco. In the city of Paso Robles, three hundred kilometres north of Los Angeles and close to the epicentre, the greatest damage was recorded. The collapse of a nineteenth-century clock tower killed two women. The earthquake cut power to the homes of some forty thousand residents and damaged more than eighty buildings. In the hours that followed, several aftershocks were recorded. The area lies on the San Andreas fault line and is one of the most seismically active regions in the world."
A comparison of the destruction caused by these two earthquakes makes plain the differences in construction practice, in materials, and most importantly in the quality and method of building — and confronts us with the question of what is to be done.
The first wave of public, governmental, and international aid has, by all appearances, reached the people of Bam, and the reconstruction phase has been declared open. Whose responsibility is reconstruction? How are the groups that have volunteered to rebuild parts of the city to be attracted and organised? How should the various parallel organisations and institutions — each operating independently — act in a way that does not lead to interference? And for whom, finally, is reconstruction (the building of houses) to be carried out?
It appears that the Reconstruction Headquarters — constituted from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Management and Planning Organisation, and chaired by the President in person — must as a first step organise working groups to gather information on the following matters:
- Information regarding the survivors
- Information regarding the city's buildings
- Technical information regarding the city
- Information regarding organisations, groups, and individuals willing to pay the costs of reconstruction
Once formed and organised, these groups can begin their work along the following lines.
Gathering Information about the Survivors
Land-preparation schemes, which have been carried out time and again in every Iranian city, come with a standard scope of services that ought, at this stage, to be respected as a minimum. These schemes, however, are usually prepared for specific groups — for instance the housing cooperatives of office or factory employees — in which, despite economic and social differences, the institution of the family remains intact. In Bam, by contrast, families have suffered grievously: among the survivors are orphaned children, and women and men who have lost the whole of their household. Housing built in the conventional manner may therefore fail to meet their needs, even though they too need shelter.
In land-preparation schemes, a questionnaire is drawn up at the outset recording the size of each household, the number of those employed, income, and the housing and household facilities required. The information is then collated and conclusions drawn from it.1
What the analysis of such surveys reveals is the economic and social profile of those seeking housing: their needs and financial means are weighed together, and applicants are grouped — for example into upper-income, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, and low-income brackets — with the plot size and floor area each could acquire established as the basis for determining housing types and prototypes. These questionnaires show which population groups exist in the city, with what needs and what latent resources — a plot of land, the possibility of taking out a loan, and so on — and what programme should be drawn up for them. Responsibility for this work could rest with the Ministry of the Interior and the Management and Planning Organisation.
Gathering Information about the City's Buildings
A survey of the city's existing fabric is the next step. The survey must establish which buildings are repairable and which sections lie in ruins and need to be rebuilt. It can be carried out using the methods of comprehensive and detail planning, producing an identity card for each location. At this stage, recent aerial photographs prepared by the Army's Geographical Organisation, together with the latest aerial maps and the most recent statistical map of the city, can be drawn on. If a new comprehensive or detail plan has been prepared for the city, its base map can also be used. The Statistical Centre and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development can take this part of the work in hand.
Gathering Technical Information about the City
Bringing together the latest comprehensive plans, detail plans, fabric-improvement plans, land-preparation plans and the like, before reconstruction begins, is essential. These documents already contain historical, geographical, and geological studies; proposals for construction informed by climate, the local availability of materials, and production capacity; architectural surveys including documentation of vernacular architecture; analyses of existing plans; and an inventory of the elements that give the city its character — material that can guide designers and prevent the duplication of work already done. To this end, the studies by Ardam Consulting Engineers — which, in respect of construction materials and many other particulars, deal with a city closely comparable to Bam — can be drawn on. Ardam designed the reconstruction of fifty-two earthquake-stricken villages in the Tabas region, partly through in-situ rebuilding and partly through relocation, and produced prototype plans adapted from existing layouts and the needs of residents that are equally usable for Bam. Other consultants have also worked in this field, and one volume of these studies is held in the archive of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and is available for use.2 By drawing on volunteer groups of architects and urban planners, the available information — much of it usable — can be put to work and duplication avoided. Even previously prepared drawings can be employed; but it must first be established in which parts of the city reconstruction is to take place. The survey may show that not all of the city's former footprint is required, and that a swift revision of the detail plan — together with the implementation of certain portions, the reform of the street network in particular — can be put in hand. Responsibility for this should naturally lie with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
Gathering Information and Organising the Funding Groups
These groups prefer to take part in reconstruction in person, or to oversee it. One of the principal duties of the Reconstruction Headquarters is therefore to offer them a suitable framework — and this is possible only when the extent of the shortfall is clearly defined: that is, when initial decisions on where in-situ rebuilding will take place and how many dwelling units will be provided through land preparation have been made. The experience of Rudbar, Manjil, and Tabas shows that people prefer in-situ rebuilding, since part of the urban infrastructure and at least the basic road network remain, and the land — relatively ready after the clearance of rubble — is available for new construction. Naturally not the whole of the city can be rebuilt; priorities must be set among those seeking in-situ rebuilding. If, for example, a neighbourhood has only ten in-situ applicants, services for that quarter cannot be provided.
The questionnaires prepared during the survey of survivors will also identify applicants by the ownership status of their previous dwelling. Those who were tenants, or who had no independent dwelling, will of course want land that ought to be made available to them. Independent reconstruction groups can play an effective part in new building on these sites, or in establishing service facilities on former locations. The Organisation for the Development and Equipment of Schools holds typological drawings for educational centres; these, once checked and adjusted for earthquake resistance, can be placed at the disposal of reconstruction groups.
A Note from Tabas
In closing, I should like to recall the experience of the Tabas reconstruction. In 1362 (1983), when I went to Tabas, some five years had passed since the earthquake. Buildings with sloping corrugated-iron (eternit) roofs, each striking its own discordant note, had turned the city into a vast peripheral settlement, distinguished from other such districts only by its palm trees. Reconstruction was still under way at the time. More than fifty per cent of the buildings in Tabas and Bam were of one or two storeys, and the code for earthquake-resistant construction of such buildings — only two pages long, and simple to apply — had not in practice been observed. One of its provisions calls for horizontal and vertical concrete tie beams, with no more than four metres between two vertical ties. In Tabas, those who built their own houses appeared to observe this simple rule; but in many cases the space between the horizontal and vertical tie beams had been filled with construction rubble instead of concrete, and it was this manner of execution that compounded the damage to the city. Where construction follows sound engineering principles, small buildings of one or two storeys do not suffer destruction on this scale. If an earthquake comparable to that of 1357 (1978) were to occur again in Tabas, the extent of destruction would not be much less than the first time. The grant of 2.5 million tomans' worth of free materials to builders and a five-million-toman loan disbursed through the country's banking system, in the form of short-term deposits at four per cent interest, will be effective only if strict supervision of the structural drawings and of construction itself is exercised in tandem — and even then this is unlikely to be achievable unless a large number of construction technicians are trained to oversee the precise execution of structural drawings on a wide scale.3
Footnotes
1. These questionnaires ought to have been kept ready and filled out alongside the rescue effort, before non-residents poured into Bam and the city's population swelled, after the disaster, to three times its previous size. Even now, it is only through the completion of these questionnaires that the genuine victims can be identified.
2. Arman-Shahr Consulting Engineers prepared the comprehensive and detail plan for the city, and it is preferable that the same consultant should handle the reconstruction plan as well.
3. The practice of renting cross-bracing — required to restrain the structure of a building against earthquake — in the south of Tehran, then dismantling it after the technical inspection and partitioning the walls with infill, is evidence of the public's lack of confidence in the measures contemplated in this field.