RDI Lecture at ITM, Medan

RDI held the 4^th monthly invited lecture for this year on May 3^th, 2016. This Lecture was given at Institute Technology of Medan, Indonesia before RDI conducted survey surrounding Mt. Sinabung. The speaker was Dr. Gavin Sulivan (Coventry University) and Dr. Saut Sagala (Institute Technology Bandung). They presented a lecture, entitled Culture and Community Resilience, and Spatial Panning for Community Resilience. 

Every culture has different way to interpret disaster risk in their local area, how their perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors influence their vulnerability. Culture can be negative factors which increase vulnerability, but in some case it can also helps community to cope with community challenges brought by disaster. Post disaster recovery and culture unexpectedly has a close connection, which might help researchers, governments, and donors to improve their implementation on disaster risk reduction, and to find the appropriate approach for the victims. Culture by definition is local features that contribute to identity and values, and make one group different from another. Culture itself has a string link with disaster because culture associated with behavior. Culture in relation to risk refers to ways people live with risk and how they cope and how they interpret their condition.

Moreover, How community resilience is related to spatial plan is explained on the basic importance of spatial plan in disaster risk reduction. Urban and regional planners, believe that by limiting the hazards through "conventional ways of dealing with that problem" such as flood control programs, building codes, insurance and disaster relief would significantly reduce hazards and the risks. Furthermore, they suggest that the impact of "limiting development" in areas at risk would minimize the potential for losses of lives and property in large hazardous events and may provide protection for sensitive environmental features. Therefore, imposing land use plan will help for strengthening  community resilience. Land use plans offer several advantage to minimize the disaster risks that people are dealing with. However, when it comes to implementation, in hazard prone, it is challenged by many factors. Not only is it unable to fully provide an exclusive safe zone to the people, but also other types of risk also play role in the resident considerations. Thus, it is necessary to identify a land use plan that can be implementable to reduce disaster risks.