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This research aims to examine three housing projects implemented by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and planned by local architects after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 in rural South India. The key to the acceptance of post-disaster houses lies in meeting the peoples’ wishes and needs, and in integrating local know-how into the course of the project process (a premise intensively discussed in theory). After the tsunami of 2004, many (NGOs) appointed architects, assuming that these professionals would be qualified to facilitate the implementation of people-oriented houses (and villages). However, the architects’ roles vary significantly, which had, as will be shown here, a considerable impact on the degree of success of the project.

Primary data for this study were gathered through household questionnaires (110); informal interaction; participant-observation (work assignment: 2.5 years; field survey: 4 months); semi-structured interviews (NGO representatives, architects and engineers). Secondary literature was studied on post-disaster housing, building cultures and cultures of knowledge.

This study reveals that, in the course of rural post-disaster reconstruction, there is a crying need to appoint the “right” personnel having, first of all, the capacity to comply with the social dynamics at project level, and, second, being able to address those aspects critical for the realization of people-oriented housing. Architects can be a valuable resource for both the NGO and the villagers. However, this paper shows that key to this is, among other considerations, a thorough understanding of the rural (building) culture, its abilities and requirements, the strategic interplay of various roles and abilities during the course of an intricate building process and the design of appropriate roles for adequately-skilled architects.

To this date, the debate on the role of architects in the context of post-disaster housing has neglected to examine empirically the implications of appointing these professionals in rural post-disaster contexts. This paper addresses this imbalance and complements the existing corpus of work by examining the impact of different roles of architects on the degree of success of the project at village level.