Mihir Bhatt, honorary director of the Disaster Mitigation Institute in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, reviews a new book by Nabeel Hamdi. "Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities" is published by Earthscan.
Humanitarian agencies and workers want major changes — they want to empower victims with rights — but they often forget to pay attention to small-scale local measures.
“Small Change”, by Nabeel Hamdi, is a small book intended for urban planners, which offers insights for humanitarian workers addressing post-disaster recovery issues.
It is easy for people working for humanitarian causes to overlook mainstream development issues.
Rapid response, emergency response, crisis management, assistance strategy and relief targeting all push humanitarian workers and agencies away from development.
Though Hamdi does not say so, it will be clear to any humanitarian worker who has spent more than the proverbial nine months of the immediate relief stage in a disaster location that disasters and development are separated for drawing up projects and pushing relief.
In reality, especially at the community level, it is usually difficult to separate disaster risk from development concerns.
Hamdi answers the four paramount concerns of urban and humanitarian sector experts:
how to scale up
what should be included in community-specific strategies
who should be involved in policies and how
and how can civil society build local authority capacity and not just complain about it.
He offers concrete examples from South and North, clarifying issues and yet retaining the complexities of each specific situation.
Hamdi reminds us that by building a bus stop in an urban slum a vibrant community sprouts around it.
The bus stop can be a tea stall and the slum can be an earthquake-affected low-income area in a town like Bhuj, Gujarat, in western India.
A community sprouts around the bus stop, discussing the quality of relief arriving, the speed of compensation payments, and who is recovering how.
No project can achieve this and no evaluation can capture its impact.
This book shows and shares what can happen when dwellers or victims take decisions about their shelter or services in a low-income area, whether it has been affected by disaster or not.
Costs drop, energy rises, individuals are inspired, and social well-being spreads.
Hamdi combines learning with practice and actions with thoughts.
Through this book he explains how to capture learning from action, and how to enrich action with learning in a direct, operational, and relaxed way.
He offers a range of tools for city recovery, which are applicable to camp planners, rehabilitation town builders, victim community leaders, and humanitarian workers.
Hamdi has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. city of Boston and at Oxford Brookes University in Britain.
More importantly, he has enthused a wide range of city planners, in both the North and the South.
His writings and meaningful personal interactions open windows to new ideas and share a rare insight.
This book does the same.
“Small Change” is not for those with mega plans, huge budgets and short-term involvement in victim communities.
It is for those who are interested in local communities and their struggles to march out of poverty and vulnerability.
Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters.
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