ABSTRACT
In recent decades, designers have been responsible for using a great deal of resources to do very little. The economic crisis that ended that era of waste was a wake-up call to the design professions. The thesis of humanitarian architecture is that there are specific skill sets and areas of expertise for architects to respond to disasters. Esther Charlesworth points out that this is similar to other specialties such as humanitarian law. One of the greatest disasters of the last decade was the 2011 earthquake in Tohoku, Japan, which was both a natural disaster and a man-made failure. A positive example of disaster recovery is the Broadmoor neighbourhood of New Orleans, which is considered one rare success in the recovery after Katrina. The lesson from Broadmoor is that if communities are involved in planning before a disaster, then they are able to start from an advanced platform rather than building from zero after a disaster strikes.
