Why ‘living heritage’ matters for community-led, post-disaster recovery
Rethinking priorities for post-disaster recovery is essential as the scale, frequency and impact of natural and climate change-related disasters grows.
Workshop participants, discussing community-centred reconstruction approaches (Photo: Francesco Pasta)
Even though the relevance of community involvement in post-disaster recovery has been evident for decades, the ability of residents to have a meaningful role in reconstruction continues to be hindered globally by a lack of enabling frameworks.
These include weak or non-existent ways of devolving resources and decision-making powers, lack of support for community-based planning initiatives, as well as difficulties translating grassroots demands into planning processes.
Besides triggering profound socio-spatial restructuring, large-scale disasters are often moments of intense reworking of state/society relations. Disasters can exacerbate existing inequalities and deepen patterns of dispossession. The urgency, scale of need and harsh physical conditions in the aftermath often pave the way for technocratic, top-down solutions which prioritise speed and scale over people-centred recovery, as well as predatory dynamics that facilitate profiteering from disasters.
Humanitarian systems often focus only on the ‘acute’ emergency phase, while the long-term effects of disasters continue to shape urban development for decades.
Yet disasters can also create ‘spaces of possibility’. They can open windows for institutional reform and transformation, informed and even shaped by grassroots mobilisation or justice-oriented agendas focused on decentralisation, participation, access to services or human rights. Although rare and often at odds with existing power imbalances, social mobilisation and even unlikely alliances may emerge in the wake of disaster, occasionally leading to meaningful institutional change and the expansion of rights.
As the Mexican sociologist Carlos Monsiváis observed after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, it is precisely in contexts where the ruling class despises the affected masses that people mobilise, exercise democracy from below and, “without asking for permission, expand their rights by exercising them”.
Shared experiences from affected communities
Against this backdrop, a collective of grassroots support organisations and socio-technical assistance groups have come together to explore community mobilisation and collaborative urban development in post-disaster settings.
Using ‘living heritage’ as an entry point, and unpacking grounded experiences from Türkiye, India and Nepal, this group hosted an event, 'Living heritage: pathways towards community-driven post-disaster reconstruction', at the 12th World Urban Forum, led by Architecture Sans Frontières UK (ASF-UK).
The aim was to identify shared entry points, narratives and policy pathways that could promote more community-centred reconstruction approaches, in ways that counterbalance predatory urban dynamics.
This insight shares reflections on how the notion of ‘living heritage’ can serve as common ground for rethinking post-disaster recovery. It also introduces a forthcoming series of blogs in which participants in this collaboration will showcase local experiences and highlight key lessons.
Workshop participants, discussing community-centred reconstruction approaches (Photo: Francesco Pasta)
Common ground to support people’s agency
In its institutionalised, state-backed form, ‘heritage’ often fixates on preserving physical structures as static ‘end states' – restoring buildings, often devoid of their inhabitants, and disregarding vernacular and everyday spaces. Disconnecting people’s lived experiences from their environment, this approach can drive dispossession and displacement, and erode the collective processes that originally shaped such layered heritage.
By contrast, living heritage refers to the dynamic interplay between tangible and intangible elements: places, people, knowledge, practices, artefacts, events and memory. It links reconstruction to housing, livelihoods, land rights, social practices, memory, belonging and local knowledge.
This broader interpretation differs from narrower conceptions, such as the one championed by UNESCO, that tend to equate ‘living heritage’ with ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
From this perspective, grassroots communities and support networks have mobilised a critical understanding of heritage to counter exclusionary urban pressures in contexts as varied as informal settlements in the historic centres of Manila (PDF) and Bangkok (PDF), the old towns of Yogyakarta (Java) and Leh (Kashmir), refugee camps in Palestine and occupied buildings in Naples (Italy).
These efforts move beyond viewing heritage as a passive backdrop to community life, instead claiming an active role for people in shaping and harnessing it to advocate for greater housing and land rights.
Three reasons
There are three core reasons why this framework is valuable for promoting people-centred planning processes:
- It emphasises continuity and adaptation, rather than restoration alone. Understanding heritage as living highlights the continuous transformation of cultures and cities, the adaptive nature of urban change and the immaterial elements that make up the fabric of urban life. This helps move beyond a narrow focus on the reconstruction of buildings and infrastructure, towards recognising the cumulative agency of people in shaping their communities over time.
- It expands who is recognised as knowledgeable. Every resident and stakeholder has valuable insights and experiences to contribute to conversations around living heritage. This helps widen the range of perspectives and knowledge base used to make decisions in post-disaster settings. Moving beyond what is typically considered as expertise, living heritage can include often discriminated voices in planning conversations.
- It offers a shared, non-confrontational space to address contested issues. Living heritage can provide a common ground for critical engagement among different stakeholders without being overtly polarising, allowing complex and seemingly unresolvable issues to be addressed. Through its inherent collectiveness and heterogeneity, it supports claims for inclusion, recognition and alternative ways of shaping urban futures.
In the aftermath of disasters, the invocation of ‘heritage’ can be misused to enact particularly violent and exclusionary socio‑spatial restructuring, imposing hegemonic socio‑cultural narratives.
Following widespread destruction, a fixation on restoring listed buildings or reconstructing idealised ‘heritage sites’ at the expense of preserving place-based community relations risks entrenching inequalities and deepening dispossession. As extreme climate events and catastrophic disasters grow more frequent, advancing people-centred narratives in reconstruction is ever more urgent.
Lessons from the ground
In this context, the series will include reflections from India, Nepal, and Türkiye – examples from different geographies and moments in time where, in the aftermath of large-scale earthquakes, ‘living heritage’ has been mobilised to activate communities and create space for grassroots-led planning in reconstruction efforts.
In India, the work of the Hunnarshala Foundation following the 2001 Kutch earthquake demonstrated how traditional, vernacular building practices could be combined with seismic‐resistant techniques, reducing costs and construction times but also cultivating social cohesion and sustainability.
In Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, Lumanti applied a ‘living heritage’ approach by working with women’s savings groups to map and prioritise public spaces and amenities across four municipalities in Kathmandu valley.
Since the 2023 Türkiye/Syria earthquakes, ASF-UK has worked with local partners in Antakya, one of the hardest-hit cities, using ‘living heritage’ to unite associations and residents in challenging the government’s top-down reconstruction.
In a global context where spaces for civic participation are increasingly constrained, while large-scale disasters are on the rise, living heritage offers a framework to expand the possibilities for action.
This is the first in a mini-series of blogs or insights which seeks to contribute to ongoing conversations on participatory recovery approaches. These seek to ensure that, in the face of exclusionary urban dynamics and top-down restructuring, people’s livelihoods, ways of living, knowledge and aspirations are prioritised.
The event was held during the 12th World Urban Forum, Cairo in November 2024. It was convened by ASF-UK and brought together representatives from Hatay Deprem Dayanışması (Earthquake Solidarity Hatay, HDD), the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights and Community Architects Network, including Lumanti Shelter Group (Nepal) and Hunnarshala Foundation (India), as well as IIED and The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (UCL, London).
