Community Responses to Disasters in the Pacific Rim: Place-making in Displacement

Community Responses to Disasters in the Pacific Rim presents different aspects of place-making in displacement in the Pacific Rim region. It focuses focus on how people respond and readjust to changes and captures the long-term community development outcomes and the critical moments that facilitate this development.

Interdisciplinary and using diverse research approaches, the book includes contributions by authors from a variety of disciplines across disaster research, sociology, urban planning, architecture, anthropology, earth science, and education. Mixed methods are adopted to carry out the research projects that ground this volume, including qualitative research for social scientific research, ethnographic methods and more importantly, Participatory Action Research (PAR) is also included by authors who have a background in design professions and a few indigenous scholars who are themselves survivors of disasters. The chapters are structured in the following five thematic sections:

1. Learning as place-making in displacement
2. Gender and place-making in response to displacement
3. Community resilience in keeping indigenous sense of place
4. Community (Re)building in displacement
5. Transnational Place-making: Talk to the Actor

Understanding how affected communities are recovering from their own perspectives, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of area studies, political science, disaster planning and human geography.

Shu-Mei Huang is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University, Taiwan.

Elizabeth Maly is Associate Professor at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS), Tohoku University, Japan.