Abstract

Poverty, illiteracy, and rurality have been widely acknowledged as barriers and sometimes carriers of catastrophic failures for complex sociocultural production of space, such as making a home after disasters. While one basic theory surrounding this phenomenon highlights the “grievance for lost homes,” the other focuses on design dissonance. The latter focuses on compromised negotiations between rehousing providers and recipients, preventing people from making the “making a home” status quo. This chapter establishes a status core for forsaken know-how and consequent misalignments. It substantiates the ultimate materialization of barriers: substandard rehousing efforts that widen the gap, preventing effective negotiations. This discourse establishes the significance of a complex process that influences rebuilding the “self” that makes a house a home. Considering specific sociocultural causes associated with “self,” which we examined through the micro-human efforts (MHE) lens, this chapter necessitates a shift in the focus from disaster events to barriers and carriers. This chapter proposes a shift prioritizing MHE or small individual efforts that could make a new status quo for making a home. MHE may have the ability to evolve into essential criteria to minimize misalignments among stakeholders, thus avoiding parasitic growth of disaster damage on a multitude of pre-existing prejudices. In essence, the lessons learnt from global cases should not be considered as coerced circumstances to tackle problems – instead, an opportunity to unpack and address backward societal and institutional processes that come close vicinity through extreme natural events.