Community Resilience and Self-Help Housing After a Natural Disaster: A Case-Study from Southwestern Uruguay

Community resilience approaches aim to understand how communities respond and adapt to changes and disturbances. In this paper, we use a community resilience approach to understand self-help housing in the context of housing reconstruction after a tornado in a small-town in southwestern Uruguay. Methods included semi-structured interviews, participant observation, Geographic Information Systems mapping, and analyses of secondary data. This paper reveals how resources were mobilized to address short term and long-term housing solutions through subsided and self-help housing after an extreme weather event. Findings suggest that subsided and self-help housing can represent short term resilience, but these solutions can be undermined by top-down decision-making processes limiting long-term capacity of housing solutions to resist future climatic stresses.

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9