Guest Editorial to the Special Issue: Lessons Learned from post-2008 Wenchuan Earthquake Community Recovery
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Guest Editorial to the Special Issue: Lessons Learned from post‑2008 Wenchuan Earthquake Community Recovery Robert Olshansky1 · Yu Xiao2 · Daniel Abramson3 Published online: 19 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
It has now been 12 years since the Wenchuan Earthquake devastated Sichuan Province, China, in May 2008. By any measure, it was one of the largest natural disasters in modern times, severely affecting an area of 50,193 square miles (130,000 square kilometers), taking over 69,000 lives (with an additional 18,000 permanently missing), and temporarily displacing 15.1 million people. It is certainly the largest natural disaster to strike modern China, comparable only to the 1976 earthquake that killed 242,000 people and destroyed Tangshan, a city of 500,000 people (Zhang et al. 2014). The rapid physical reconstruction, completed in most places in less than 3 years, was remarkable. Several publications at the time documented this rapid reconstruction process (e.g., Yong and Booth 2011; Dunford and Li 2011) or described the recovery planning and its administration (Ge et al. 2010). But recovery is about more than reconstructing buildings and infrastructure. Successful recovery is about rebuilding economies, communities, and lives. Over the years, researchers have studied the effects of the earthquake and subsequent recovery on households (e.g., Yang et al. 2015; Wilczak 2017; Fayazi et al. 2019), but, with a few exceptions (e.g., Abramson and Qi, 2011; Dong, 2012; Jiang 2014; Liu et al. 2014; Chandrasekhar et al. 2014; Song et al. 2017), relatively little scholarship has reflected upon the quality of community-level recovery or community planning processes. Such studies would fill an important need in the scholarship of disaster recovery, especially because of both the large scale of this disaster—the Wenchuan Earthquake significantly affected one of the nation’s great economies—and because of the unique approach that China took to rapidly rebuild.
* Robert Olshansky [email protected] Yu Xiao [email protected] Daniel Abramson [email protected] 1
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 611 Taft Drive, Champaign, IL 61820, USA
2
Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, College of Urban & Public Affairs, Portland State University, 506 SW Mill St, Portland, OR 97201, USA
3
Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, 410 Gould Hall, Box 355740, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
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Natural Hazards (2020) 104 (Suppl 1):S1–S3
As the 10-year anniversary of the Wenchuan Earthquake approached, we sought to identify and highlight emerging research providing critical reflections, through various lenses, on the success of community-level recovery over time. With the generous opportunity provided by Natural Hazards to publish a Special Issue, we solicited papers for the annual conference of the International Association for China Planning, held at Harbin in June 2017. The response, which consisted of 13 papers spanning three conf
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