Building new houses or long-term recovery? A combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence from earthquake-displaced households in Sichuan, China

The Potential of Open Space for Enhancing Urban Seismic Resilience: A literature Review

“…Vacant land provides spare capacity and flexibility, ensuring that there is a back-up or alternative available that has the ability to change, evolve and adapt in the face of disaster [15,16]. Parallel to the reconstruction of the affected buildings, open space has the potential for new buildings and the redevelopment of a city in the recovery process [17]. However, the suitability of open spaces for urban resilience depends on the type of open space in relation to the specific disaster and conditions.…”

Development and divergent post-disaster trajectories in a mountain village: Temporal dynamics of differentiation after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake

“…The bulk of research on the Wenchuan earthquake, whether regarding the role of civil society (Teets, 2009;Xu, 2017), state power and Party-state legitimacy (Sorace, 2017), the ways in which the earthquake became a catalyst for rural planning and urban-rural integration (Abramson & Qi, 2011;Wilczak, 2017aWilczak, , 2017b, reconstruction planning and implementation (Dunford & Li, 2011;Peng, 2015), or household recovery (Lin, Wang, & Liu 2017;Park & Wang, 2017) was conducted in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The important yet often neglected medium to long-term phase of post-disaster reconstruction and recovery must be examined for a more accurate understanding of recovery, or lack thereof (Dunford & Li, 2011;He et al 2019). Our study contributes to this understanding.…”

“…These methods are common in qualitative research in contemporary China, including on earthquake recovery (e.g. Peng et al, 2018a;He et al, 2019).…”

“…In a study of the "risks" of concentrated settlement, Peng et al (2018a, p. 9) discuss the importance of "economic risks" --"difficulty of income growth, low level of employment skills, mismatch between living and production ways, insufficient public budget, and difficulty of land adjustment." In Summit Village, economic problems arose not from "low level of skills," an issue seemingly addressable via training (though see He et al 2019 on the ineffectiveness of training), but rather loss of the ability to operate nongjiales and a lack of other options in a region that the state has zoned for tourism and ecological protection.…”

“…The World Bank, for example, states that the Sichuan recovery process "serves as an example of the large-scale reconstruction that aims… [to] use the reconstruction to improve local economies and living standards of the affected population" (2018). However, few assessments have been undertaken of long-term trajectories of household recovery following the earthquake (but see He, Aitchison, Hussey, & Chen, 2019). The bulk of research on the Wenchuan earthquake, whether regarding the role of civil society (Teets, 2009;Xu, 2017), state power and Party-state legitimacy (Sorace, 2017), the ways in which the earthquake became a catalyst for rural planning and urban-rural integration (Abramson & Qi, 2011;Wilczak, 2017aWilczak, , 2017b, reconstruction planning and implementation (Dunford & Li, 2011;Peng, 2015), or household recovery (Lin, Wang, & Liu 2017;Park & Wang, 2017) was conducted in the immediate aftermath of the quake.…”