It has been over a year since the devastating earthquake hit south-east Turkey and north-west Syria. The voluntary student initiative, Architectural Recovery Team (ART), was quickly founded at the TU Delft after this disaster. A few architecture students wanted to help and realised that the best way they could contribute was with their knowledge. The foundation, which started as Syrian-Turkish Architectural Recovery Team, now also has a Moroccan team and changed their name to Architectural Recovery Team, focussing on more areas affected by earthquakes. ART consists of volunteers from different disciplines, like architecture, engineering, psychology, earth sciences and more. This way, they connect their diverse knowledge and are able to provide recovery and rebuilding of areas affected by earthquakes. Their goal is to accommodate permanent, safe, earthquake-resistant housing that is sustainable and affordable, while also giving people who are traumatised by this tragedy a trusting surrounding.
But what is the root of the problem? Why was the death toll so extremely high?
While an earthquake is a natural disaster and therefore inevitable, many deaths could have been prevented. The danger of an earthquake is the collapsing of buildings. During the earthquake, over 200.000 buildings in Turkey were heavily damaged. Most of these buildings were not even a decade old. So how is it possible that these new buildings, built in an earthquake-sensitive area, were this fragile? Who is responsible for this disaster?
The answer is much more political than you might expect. Construction regulations have been poorly enforced and the government has provided an amnesty law, meaning an exemption: permission to not follow a rule. This means that the buildings that were built in the high-risk regions were illegally built and the government knew that these buildings were not earthquake resistant. A report of the Environment and Urbanisation Ministry of Turkey stated in 2018 that more than 50% of the buildings in Turkey, which is an equivalent to 13 million buildings, were constructed in violation of regulations. For example, builders have been mixing too much water with concrete, making a building too fragile, to accelerate the process and make it cheaper and the government allowed this. All of this caused a lot of controversy and people taking legal action against the authorities.
More than a year after the disaster, people in the affected areas are still surrounded by rubble and living in tents, which goes to show that the need for rebuilding and recovery is urgent. Temporary housing is not a solution in the long term, and that is why ART has designed secure, permanent housing and is now in the process of realising these designs.
“Conceptually, it all comes back to the idea that, rather than resisting the movement of the Earth, you let the building move with it.” - Miho Mazereeuw, professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
