Rebuilding Communities Following Disaster: Lessons from Kobe and Los Angeles

Abstract

the magnitude 6.7 Northridge Earthquake struck the Los Angeles region in southern California, costing over $48 billion in direct losses and leaving 25,000 housing units uninhabitable. Exactly one year later, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck the Kobe region of Japan, causing approximately $150 billion in losses, the loss of over 6,400 lives, and severe damage to nearly 450,000 housing units. This paper reports on a study that sought to understand the local and individual planning and reconstruction decisions following these two earthquakes, set within the larger context of regional and national policies. It summarizes reconstruction progress and planning decisions for seven urban districts in the two affected areas. The next catastrophic urban disaster to strike a developed nation will be extraordinarily expensive, and prudence demands preparedness for both post-disaster financing and planning processes; provision of temporary and permanent housing requires external funding and local flexibility; local governments need to combine firm safety regulations with citizen participation in reconstruction planning; and post-disaster planning -to be fast, effective, equitable, and provide some improvements over previous conditions -requires well-funded planning processes, rich in information and communication.

Disaster impact and recovery: what children and young people can tell us

“…Many children wanted the cathedral to be repaired rather than rebuilt. In this, the children's views accorded with those of Olshansky et al (2006) who, in their analysis of recovery following the Kobe and Los Angeles earthquakes, argue that it is better to repair buildings than rebuild. The second category included children who wanted to build new and have a fresh start.…”

“…Negative trends that existed before the disaster tend to persist in its aftermath (Olshansky et al 2006), at both the family and wider community level. Thus, families and places with good economic, community and other networks are often more resilient.…”

Measuring Recovery to Build up Metrics of Flood Resilience Based on Pollutant Discharge Data: A Case Study in East China

“…The existing literature has shown that infrastructure recovery capability could serve as important proxy of community recovery capability [24,[33][34][35]51] and provide a reference when assessing community resilience to natural disasters [52]. Therefore, in this step, the measured infrastructure recovery capability would be used as the external validation metrics to identify dominant resilience factors in the study area.…”

“…This is because evidence has shown that recovery processes are closely related to antecedent conditions which serve as a baseline for resilience assessment. The antecedent conditions are determined by multi-dimensional community characteristics, such as social, economic, infrastructural, environmental components, each of which is associated with the metrics of resilience measurement [11,23,24]. The higher the resilience, the more quickly a community recovers to normal functioning [25,26].…”

“…Since defining the concept of recovery should specify the type and intensity of disaster (e.g., flood or earthquake, catastrophic disaster or minor event) [17,24,29] and distinguish short-term recovery from long-term recovery [30][31][32], selecting proper indicators as a proxy of community recovery performance should be particularized case by case. For disasters with short-term recovery process, post-disaster community performance mainly focus on restoration to pre-disaster functions, and at most cases are evaluated by a set of infrastructure recovery indicators, such as building reconstruction, refunctions of key utilities and productivity recovery [33,34].…”