Many of this book’s narrators describe the immense physical destruction caused by the earthquake, including the leveling of whole neighborhoods. The following provides background on Port-au-Prince’s development, construction, and urban planning that substantially exacerbated the disaster.
Haiti is an exceptionally centralized nation: Port-au-Prince contains 80 percent of its industrial, commercial and banking facilities, as well as more than half of its hospitals and universities. Port-au-Prince grew rapidly during the last half of the twentieth century. In the 1980s and ’90s, the population increased by approximately 115,000 each year. This expansion was largely driven by economic hardship andeyo, or outside of the city. Economically driven deforestation and soil degradation, as well as the flooding and undermining of the domestic Haitian market with cheap foreign rice and other food staples, have destroyed agricultural livelihoods in many parts of the country, triggering mass migration to Port-au-Prince.
There were very few public resources and little infrastructure to support impoverished newcomers in Port-au-Prince. With affordable housing options scarce, many build shelters wherever they find a sliver of empty land. As a result, much of the city consists of informal settlements, many located in areas at high risk of natural disasters (steep, unstable slopes and ravine bottoms, for example). This growth pattern, combined with crushing poverty and a lack of urban planning, means that most neighborhoods lack connections to critical services like water, sewers, and roads.
Poor recordkeeping and contested property rights have also hampered efforts to improve urban conditions. “It [is] very difficult to trace the ownership of any piece of land in Port-au-Prince,” said Braulio Eduardo Morera, an architect with international design firm Arup, who worked on the earthquake reconstruction effort. “In most places, because the informal settlements had been there for so long, claiming rights over land, even if you had a property register, was very difficult. That creates environments where no one knows who’s in charge of what.”
One fact not in dispute, however, is the built environment’s role in the devastation. As a saying commonly heard among disaster-relief specialists and geologists goes, earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do. After surveying the post-quake damage, seismologist Roger Bilham wrote in Nature, “The disaster could have been averted had sound construction practices been adhered to throughout the region.”
Due to lack of funds and material resources, Port-au-Prince builders cut corners wherever possible. Haitian design and construction practices at all levels are very poor by seismic standards, and the government cannot enforce existing building codes. Structural reinforcement, for instance, is underutilized. Earthquake-safe construction standards require the embedding of steel reinforcement bars, or rebar, at strategic locations within concrete structures. Port-au-Prince builders often employ them incompletely or simply leave them out, and the rebar common in Haitian buildings is often substandard and ineffectual, lacking necessary design elements or utilizing recycled material that has been damaged.
The concrete mixes used in Port-au-Prince are also problematic. Concrete is made of cement, water, and materials known as aggregates. The quality and quantity of each component, as well as the process by which they are joined, are critical for creating solid buildings—including an adequate portion of the cement, the most expensive element in concrete. Tragically, too little cement was used in building Port-au-Prince.
Estimates placed the total number of people living in temporary shelters in the first months at 1.3 million. Another half million moved in with family or others who had shelter. Tent camps sprang up around the city. Six months after the quake, the UN reported, “While many have settled in well-organized, managed camps, others survive in spontaneous settlements where services are intermittent at best.”
The six largest camps were concentrated on parks, public squares, or empty lots. For a time, the provision of water, food, and other services at these sites drew people from around the city. Conditions were far from ideal, however, with frequent reports of overcrowding, lack of food and water, and lack of personal security—including an epidemic of sexual violence.
In March 2013, the International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.) claimed that 320,000 people were still living in hundreds of camps scattered around the city. By January 2015, the number had shrunk to 80,000—considerably fewer, but still a huge number considering people had been living in tents for five years since the initial disaster.
One promising development to emerge from the reconstruction effort has been formal recognition of the city’s vast squatter settlements. Before the earthquake, the government planned to forcibly relocate 1.2 million people who lived in neighborhoods that had existed for decades but were not recognized on any official level. After working with international design, planning, and policy experts that offered help with reconstruction, the idea of relocation was abandoned, and the government committed to integrating these settlements into the city. According to architect Darren Gill, who spent several years working with Architecture for Humanity in Port-au-Prince, “Getting these informal communities (literally) onto the map was probably one of the greatest achievements of urban planning in post-earthquake Haiti.”