How can the complexity and challenges of physical reconstruction across diverse disciplines, stakeholders and governance be organised and synthesised?

This special issue examines how reconstruction after disasters is organised amongst many actors and an array of complex (and often competing) issues. Do current debates and practices on physical territorial reconstruction (i.e. after destruction by natural disasters, warfare, conflict or industrial accidents) reflect the scope required to address the whole range of complex issues?

The papers reveal that the increasing sophistication of reconstruction knowledge is paradoxically contributing to its fragmentation in both theory and practice. There may be a need for forms of synthesis capable of giving operational coherence to these otherwise separate efforts.

Guest editor: Paolo Tombesi

Each contribution approached reconstruction through different interpretations of the term and different objects: housing prototypes, temporary accommodation, engineering expertise, institutional memory, spatial justice, social capital, heritage, energy infrastructure, preparedness, supply chains and urban recovery. If the diversity might have immediately appeared to reproduce precisely the fragmentation that motivated the special issue, something else emerged as a common trait. Almost every contribution began from a relatively bounded problem, to subsequently discover that the problem could not be understood within those boundaries. Reconstruction, in other words, repeatedly forced the analysis beyond the disciplinary or sectoral territory in which it began.

This special issue substantially confirms the premise of the call whilst re-formulating its implied solution. Fragmentation is indeed a challenge; yet synthesis cannot mean dissolving disciplinary differences into overarching normative protocols. Reconstruction requires frameworks capable of connecting partial understandings without eliminating the specificity from which their in-depth explanatory value derives.

Reconstruction is not one problem imperfectly divided among different disciplines: it is a phenomenon constituted by the interaction of multiple problems. Physical rebuilding, social recovery, institutional reconstruction, economic production, cultural continuity and political transformation are not parallel processes that can simply be added together after separate analyses. They continually condition one another.

Table of contents

Technologies of reconstruction [editorial]
P. Tombesi

Critical Reconstruction Theory and the invention of post-disaster response
G. Lizarralde, D, Wachsmuth, F. Özdoğan & M. Cossu

Negotiating expertise in Nepal’s post-earthquake disaster reconstruction
K. Rankin, M. Suji, B. Pandey, J. Baniya, D.V. Hirslund, B. Limbu, N. Rawal & S. Shneiderman

Post-war reconstruction-as-knowledge practice: Fukui’s dual disaster recovery
A.Y.F. Urushima & K. Yamaguchi

Post-disaster reconstruction and ethics: the power of social capital
B. Ubesingha, G. Ofori, G. Agyekum-Mensah & D. Frings

Reframing disaster recovery through spatial justice: an integrated framework
M.A. Gasseloğlu & J.E. Gonçalves

Creating resilient cities: advocacy and planning for equity-based recovery
A. Paidakaki

Post-disaster reconstruction: infill housing prototypes for Kathmandu
J. Bolchover & K. Mundle

Rethinking the second life of post-disaster and post-conflict temporary housing
N. Akdede, B.Ö. Ay & İ. Gürsel Di̇no

Reconstruction in post-war Rome: transnational flows and national identity
J. Jiang

Disaster reconstruction: practitioner insights improve outcomes [commentary]
R. Potangaroa, K. Zuo & S. Wilkinson

Rebuilding energy infrastructure after war [commentary]
M.N. Binetti

Disaster reconstruction: rebuilding trust in fragile states [commentary]
T.N. Haddad & T. Sakr

Preparedness for recovery [commentary]
K. MacAskill & L. Dalziel

Lessons from disaster recovery: build better before [commentary]
M.C. Comerio

The search for urban recovery in Lebanon [commentary]
H. al-Harithy