Transitional housing, time travel and 'lost worlds'
While conducting
fieldwork in central Italy some years ago, I met a priest whose name was
Dante Paolino. Don Paolino was very fond of his namesake, the 14th-century poet
Dante. He presented me with a copy of a book he had written and published,
entitled The Divine Comedy Brought Up to Date. In this, he used Dante's
great masterpiece as a vehicle for commenting on the wiles of the modern world.
Readers with a literary disposition may remember that in the Divine Comedy
Dante recounts how he is conducted around Hell, Purgatory and Heaven by his
mentor, the Roman poet Virgil. The poem is very much a commentary on life and
mores in mediaeval Tuscany. In Don Dante Paolino's 20th century version, one of
the circles of hell is entirely populated with earthquake victims from the
South of Italy (he wrote it shortly after the 1980 Irpinia-Basilicata
earthquake, which damaged or destroyed the homes of 400,000 people).
In examining
transitional shelter, one is motivated to ask what is 'transitional' for people
who lack the resources to get out of it and have been abandoned by their
government? Is the answer Hell or merely Purgatory? Sudden-impact disasters can
abruptly cast people from a stable existence, one that is normal in terms of
their expectations, and those of the communities in which they live, to one
that is anything but stable and normal. Stability may be achieved by a form of
'suspended animation', in which a temporary situation 'freezes' and becomes
permanent.
At the turn of the
millennium, the city of Messina still had some of the temporary accommodation erected
after the 1908 Strait of Messina earthquake and tsunami. Granted, it was no
longer used as primary housing, but it was still there. Likewise, vestiges of
the temporary accommodation can be found in the vicinity of Avezzano,
central-southern Italy, even though a century has passed since the 1915
earthquake, which killed 32,500 people and devastated the town.
Romagnano al Monte is
one of the smallest municipalities in the Region of Campania, southern Italy.
Its fiscal position is gloomy and its political weight is negligible. Hence, 35
years after the 1980 earthquake that devastated the town and necessitated
complete evacuation of the original urban fabric, the wooden prefabs are still
in situ. The town hall and local coffee bar are still in prefabricated
buildings erected by the Italian government at Christmas 1980. To be fair, part
of this is a matter of convenience. Prefabs that served as people's
transitional homes have been turned into holiday accommodation, but they are
still a visual reminder of a long phase of waiting in "transitional"
circumstances, while reconstruction slowly, painfully got underway.
The town coffee bar at
Romagnano al Monte, southern Italy,
a prefab
erected after the 1980 earthquake and photographed in 2011.
Italian Government policy on transitional shelter in the aftermath of the L'Aquila (central Italy) earthquake of 2009 is described in more detail elsewhere in this book and is interesting because it is so radical. Lavishing very large sums of money on transitional shelter can be interpreted as a message to the beneficiaries that the temporary situation is designed to last. It is an expression of pessimism in the ability to find the necessary money and political drive to achieve full recovery in any reasonable length of time.
Once, during a tour of
the backwoods of rural Calabria (southern Italy), I drove around a corner and
came face to face with a group of about 20 prefabs, nestling in a valley. I
found out that they had been built for families made homeless by a large
landslide about 25 years previously. There they lay, fully inhabited and
completely forgotten by the rest of society. How many more "lost
worlds" of this kind are there?
Transitional shelter is an artefact of wealthy countries. Units usually cost upwards of US$20,000, and possibly much more than that, with transportation and site preparation costs included. Whereas the problem of transitional shelter that does not adequately fit the needs of its beneficiaries is well known in the context of donor countries supplying it to poor nations that have suffered disaster, there is a parallel set of issues associated with the domestic use of shelter in rich, or relatively rich, countries.
Barrack-style temporary
housing was supplied to homeless survivors of the 1968 earthquakes in the
Belice Valley of western Sicily. It was unpleasant to live in, cramped and
poorly situated with respect to people's needs (such as travel to work,
agricultural activities and shopping for basic necessities), but it was a roof
over their heads at a critical moment. Predictably, as soon as alternative
accommodation was arranged, it was abandoned. On a blisteringly hot day in the
summer of 1983 I visited the prefabs and found them silent, deserted and empty
amid the parched fields. Later, with the influx of illegal migrants from North
Africa, they were recolonised by groups of people who were lower down the
social scale than the original beneficiaries. In similar manner, in central
Italy, the land abandoned after the massive landslide of 1982 in the city of
Ancona was briefly colonised by itinerant groups of Roma, who had nowhere else
to pitch camp.
These are situations in
which transitional housing has contributed to a 'ghettoisation' of the disaster
area, which may, as time goes on, accumulate a sense of relative permanence.
Thus, transitional housing is capable of creating a new stratification in local
society—between the upper caste, who did not lose their permanent homes, and
the lower caste, who did, and are forced to live in the prefabs. Community
spirit and solidarity are not well served by such a distinction and one hopes
that recovery policies will eliminate it as soon as possible by doggedly pursuing
full reconstruction and eventually dismantling the prefabs. Yet this is often
not the case.
In many countries where
there is substantial poverty, a significant proportion of the population lives
in so-called 'informal' housing. In cities such as Rio de Janeiro this can
attain remarkable levels of social and architectural sophistication, while at
the same time retaining all the crude drawbacks of precarious, unplanned
urbanisation. At its very worst, the permanence of transitional housing in
richer countries could be regarded as a regression to something akin to the
'informal' settlements of less fortunate countries. Granted, it does not go all
the way and is a far cry from the lawlessness and destitution that characterise
such places in many of the world's developing metropolises. However, if nothing
else, the presence of these situations, frozen in time, and the social
realities that they represent, call into question the definition of welfare.
Where it exists,
welfare is the social safety net. It can be defined as "the provision of
care to a minimum acceptable standard to people who are unable adequately to
look after themselves." This begs the question of what the 'minimum
acceptable standard' should be, and what it entails? The answer is highly variable
from one country to another, even among wealthy nations. With increases in
global mobility—and people-trafficking—there is also a burning question about to
whom welfare applies. In many respects, the solution is a matter of
determining what welfare is not, instead of what it is.
Transitional housing is
usually donated to its users. They do not have to buy it and probably do not
pay rent to live in it. Local authorities may be charged with maintaining it,
unless a central government agency takes over this function. In the case of the
Great Eastern Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, transitional housing
was supplied to many people and families whose homes had been swept away by the
waves. It was designed and supplied under central government auspices. it was
highly standardised and a balance was struck between functionality and cost.
Living in the transitional units was unpleasant, but it embodied a pact between
the residents and the Japanese Government: endure these conditions for up to
seven years, but no more, and you will move into safe, acceptable permanent
housing. Hence, the key to understanding transitional housing lies in whether
there is a relationship of trust between the users and the government (at
whichever level), an how strong that relationship is.
Transitional housing
near Ishinomaki, northeast Japan, in 2013.
The welfare function of
transitional housing in cases that differ strongly from the Japanese example
is, in effect, truncated. The Government is telling survivors, in so many
words, "we will start you off on the road to recovery by providing basic
shelter" but the rest is up to you, and if you do not have the resources
to progress beyond this stage, this is where you will remain."
Paradoxically, this
sort of failure of welfare induces dependency. Beneficiaries can go neither
forward nor backward. They are politically weightless, not empowered, not
listened to. It is to be expected that such situations are most common in areas
that are backwaters in a country's political and economic life. From the point
of view of a government administrator, or a politician seeking re-election, it
does not matter if the inhabitants of a forgotten mountain valley are left in
limbo. Yet occasionally such situations turn around. The inertia in western
Sicily after the 1968 earthquakes became a festering problem that forced the
Italian Government to act 15-20 years after the disaster, which it did using
what Americans will recognise as 'pork-barrel legislation', the enactment of
measures on the back of provisions for other disasters. Elsewhere, the plight
of the 'transitional tribes' will become a matter, not so much for
anthropologists, but for archaeologists!
