The Haitian government, together with the donor community, was urged to accelerate the removal of rubble in the aftermath of the devastating Magnitude 7.0 earthquake near Port-au-Prince in August 2010. This recommendation was made by a think tank, which emphasized that clearing rubble was the single most important step toward reconstruction of housing and infrastructure. The study noted that unless rubble was cleared expeditiously, hundreds of thousands of Haitians would still be in tent camps during the 2011 hurricane season.
The removal of rubble proved to be a challenging task, as it was viewed as a means to the end of enabling the recovery of lives, communities, and societies in the wake of disasters. The rubble issue was further complicated by the profound issue of ownership, which was a significant challenge to the UN cluster system in 2005. The case studies that followed reflected extraordinary effort, but also suggested that the questions surrounding rubble clearance remained only partially answered, to the detriment of those living in and out of camps.
The rubble and broken buildings littering settlements after the earthquake effectively decreased the size of those settlements, and thus the supply of land available for sheltering people and recovering economic, educational, governance, and other activities. The land and housing markets in those settlements were exacerbated significantly by the earthquake’s impacts, making it extremely challenging to respond to widespread shelter needs, while also affecting the longer-term process of recovery. Shelter and land issues in urban areas pose particular challenges to humanitarian organizations, many of which have their genesis, institutional memories, protocols, and expertise in rural areas.
The neighbourhood approach, adopted by several actors, was identified as a means of both working in rubble-strewn areas to provide humanitarian assistance and establishing a platform for subsequent reconstruction. This settlements-based approach to shelter provision was seen as a way to promote inter-cluster coordination, lending critically important on-the-ground support to the cluster approach. The neighbourhood approach, if adopted and implemented early in the response effort, is an effective means of promoting inter-cluster coordination and lending support to the cluster approach.