Architects are often the last people needed in disaster reconstruction

Most of them focus on buildings rather than people, and will be of little use in Haiti or Chile

Steve Rose's article concerning Haiti and the demands of disaster-zone architecture is wide of the mark when he states that shelter after disaster and the plight of hundreds of millions of slum dwellers are "real, urgent problems for architects to solve" (Out of the wreckage, 15 February).

As I was told by a professor when studying some 20 years ago, the role of architects in these circumstances is "marginal at best". In fact, most architects are taught almost the exact opposite of what is needed. Architects are taught to focus on the product (a building), whereas humanitarian practitioners major on the process (involving people). For architects, ownership of the design rests with them and fellow professionals; for the aid world, engaging beneficiaries through sharing decisions is paramount.

Good post-disaster shelter interventions engage those affected in solving their own problems. When this doesn't happen, the results can be painful. As your article notes, Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation employed high-profile architects to produce "funky housing types" in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, but was criticised for "transplanting alien architecture into a context where it wasn't called for".

Too many aid-delivered shelter programmes have lacked genuine participation by affected people, and as a consequence have been poorly designed and wrongly located. Architects need to be taught this stuff if they are to be relevant in places where disasters like this happen.

Take Haiti, and now Chile. The need is immense and the issues extremely complex. As your article states: "Natural and man-made disasters have created similar circumstances around the world, where homes, schools, hospitals, and other structures are needed quickly and cheaply." Yet before the earthquake some 75% of Haiti's population was already poor. This disaster was anything but natural. Buildings fell down because of poor maintenance, lack of planning, and mismanagement. As Salvano Briceno of the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction stated: "It's poverty that is at the core of these disasters."

Reconstruction in places where disasters are caused more by poverty than natural phenomena involves building back what can't be seen as much as what can. I agree with Robin Cross of Article 25, the UK's leading architectural aid charity, who says: "You need to pick up those [social and economic] threads and build a new Haiti around them."

Some architects may argue that to take this on board is too intractable and is beyond their remit. But this is the nature of the beast, and they cannot afford to ignore it. Architects must evolve to address the radically different circumstances for which they were trained.

Beyond the groundbreaking work of Architecture For Humanity and of Article 25 to which you refer, architects need to move beyond their traditional role of designers of buildings in places of relative certainty, to become facilitators of building processes that involve people in places of uncertainty and rapid change. Without this change, architects will remain on the margins of humanitarian response.

David Sanderson, The Guardian 03-03-2010