Post conflict housing reconstruction: housing needs and expectations of conflict affected communities

Abstract

Post conflict housing reconstruction plays an important role in establishing the country’s development and prospect of peace. Despite this importance, it was identified that there are inconsistencies between the provision of built housing and the needs of the users. Therefore many post conflict housing reconstruction projects lead to dissatisfaction on the part of residents and remodelling by themselves or rejection and abandonment. Hence it is important and necessary to address conflict affected communities’ housing reconstruction needs in post conflict housing reconstruction. With regard to this, it is worthwhile to examine the concept of housing needs in general and to explore the housing needs of conflict affected communities. Therefore this paper aims to present a synthesis of housing needs literature relevant to usual and post conflict contexts. In relevance to housing needs in general, housing preferences in a market context and adequate housing measures were identified. Following this, housing needs of conflict affected communities were identified. In a market context, housing needs were exhibited in terms of the subjective preferences of households. Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Hence adequate housing measures identified certain aspects of housing that must be taken into account for this purpose in any particular context. Whilst most housing considerations of conflict affected communities were similar to adequate housing measures, conflict affected communities gave greater importance to their social, cultural and religious values in post conflict housing reconstruction. In addition they considered the aspects of safety and security as being vital, and various perceptions of these communities in relation to housing reconstruction and post occupancy evaluation were important in post conflict housing reconstruction. Nevertheless, no relevant data on special housing needs of disadvantaged groups in post conflict environments were found