Paper presented at the XXXIII IAHS World Congress on Housing, 27-30 September 2005,"Transforming Housing Environments through Design", University of Pretoria.
Natural disasters, especially earthquake have always been the cause of innumerous life and property damages in different countries including Iran. Among the most significant challenges posed to disaster-hit people, the authorities involved in reconstruction and rehabilitation immediately after disaster is how to settle the homeless or out sheltered people. Despite previous experiences, inattention to logical predictions and necessary foreseen estimates concerning settlement issue unfortunately leads to making decisions that contain flaws and setbacks causing not only waste of expenses and time delay in bringing residential units into service, but are also associated with discontent of the people who are suffering consequences of a natural disaster. Accordingly, in this research work, attention shall be paid firstly to the general concept governing settlement issue and then some social, cultural and welfare aspects regarding different methods of settlement shall be investigated. At the end, some samples of various settlement schemes in the Bam city following the 2003 earthquake shall also be discussed.
