Sometimes, municipalities rebuild with the same materials and plans as before. After heavy bombing in 1945, Warsaw was reconstructed according to pre-war plans, carefully restoring its monuments, streets, and homes. On the other hand, in the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March 2011, it was necessary to move communities to tsunami-safe land, meaning that villages were relocated and necessarily redesigned. After studying and drawing knowledge from relevant post-disaster reconstruction examples throughout history and geography, it quickly became clear that an overly rushed response, along with a ‘fixed’ design solution, can lead a city to repeat its mistakes – or worse, create a new urban environment that alienates its residents. As a resident of Poggioreale, Sicily, which suffered an earthquake in 1968 told The Guardian: ‘I felt like an immigrant, [living in a substitute city] four kilometres away from my real home.’

Our design efforts for Antakya oscillate between building new and preserving memories recorded in a lost urban fabric. An open-ended design framework, in lieu of a ‘fixed’ masterplan, is better suited to this context and place as it offers the necessary flexibility to give a city in distress the tools to move forward.

Recovery will be dependent on legislative efforts and adequate investment, meaning that the ‘success’ of any rebuilding is often enabled – or curtailed – by economic and political contexts. However, architects and urban designers do have a key role to play; we can make informed and intelligent proposals, we know how to make the spaces between buildings function better, and we can promote and advocate for a fairer process of co-design that returns a sense of agency to the people of Antakya. This is a non-linear process requires much more than quick construction – habits, memories, trust, and a sense of ownership cannot return overnight.

Rebuilding Antakya is a social project as much an architectural and infrastructural one; it must address the practicalities of safely rebuilding structures that provide shelter and security, while restoring a community’s habitual and emotional ways of life – the rhythms that sustain Antakya’s rich identity. Our framework attempts to do this across all scales. It understands rebuilding as an act of sustained care and attention, one dependent on and guided by community.

Full article: Developing a Post-Earthquake Design Framework