Disaster Impacts

3.1 DISPLACEMENT & DISPOSSESSION 3.2 DISCONNECTION TO PLACE

Displacement caused by flooding also predominantly causes home loss. This consequence is enormous as it harms the social identity of affected communities by damaging such essential social factors of identity as home. The concept of a home founds the basic framework that reflects our sense of self, self-worth, understanding of the surrounding environments (Pallasmaa 1994). Those becoming homeless after the disaster are so vulnerable and displaced that they rationally seek ways to reconstruct their self-identity and sense of belonging via rebuilding their homes. Henceforth, spatial designs facilitating family unions and encouraging physical and mental disabilities to recover and adapt should receive the predominant concentration during the design process regardless of both typology and scales of projects. After any disaster, most life aspects of affected individuals become impossible for anyone to perceive as normal as before. For example, they are more likely to find such pleasuring landscapes as rivers and beaches to become threats to their survival, such as cyclones, typhoons, and floods. Disasters strongly reimagine perceptions of those residents in the affected community about their surroundings, from assets to threats. After a disaster, nothing is left untouched but either demolished or crowned with a new negative identity (Parkinson, 2000). The mentioned displacement of people as an aftermath of disasters means lessening the community’s labour force and taking away most of its intellectual skills authority and, thereby, worsening the devastating scenario. Hence, the remaining individuals are more likely to become least connected to their homes.

3.3 DISEMPOWERMENT

These aftermaths of one disaster adversely challenge affected communities by such undermining consequences as hurting businesses, cutting down jobs, disorientating social structures, leaving traditional roles in society irrelevant, and overwhelming local victims. Although these consequences tend to be resolvable by foreign aids coming from national governments, foreign governments, charity groups, and international agencies of the United Nations, these aids might eventually distort the local economy and remove its independence (Taylor 2009, as quoted by Donovan 2013). As a result, a sense of disempowerment gets established in which the affected victims become helpless in making sensibly personal decisions regarding their destiny, insights, and social functionality. Henceforth, the ‘sense of mastery of their world’ and the accompanying ‘deep sense of wellbeing’ are stripped away (Borrell 2011, as quoted by Donovan 2013).

3.4 PSYCHOLOGY IMPACTS

It is evident that flooding is highly stressful and that the tension lasts long after the water has retreated. Flooding affects individuals of all ages and can cause grief, enormous economic issues for families, behavioural problems in children, increased drug use and/or abuse, increased domestic violence and aggravating, causing, or inciting people’s mental health problems. (2011, Health Protection Agency) Many factors influence the likelihood of getting PTSD following a flooding incident.These include demographic factors (female, young and old age, low income, and low education) as well as stressors both during the event (severe physical injury to self or others, fear of dying or witnessing others die, being trapped, previous experience with a flood or traumatic event) and secondary stressors in the long term (continued disrepair of housing, displacement, low levels of social support).

4. Understanding

ENVIRONMENT HUMAN

HEALING ARCHITECTURE

Figure 7. Relevant person-environment . From Thao Nguyen Le, by Thao Nguyen Le, 2021. Copyright 2021 by Thao Nguyen Le.