Implementing post-earthquake reconstruction plans in China: a resilience perspective
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Implementing post‑earthquake reconstruction plans in China: a resilience perspective Yiwen Shao1 · Jiang Xu2 Received: 22 December 2017 / Accepted: 15 November 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract This paper offers a critical investigation on the implementation of reconstruction plans in China following Wenchuan Earthquake through the lens of disaster resilience. The analysis is built upon a resilience in planning framework which consists of nine attributes. Empirical cases of two typical towns in Wenchuan County, Weizhou and Yingxiu, are discussed and compared. This paper upholds an evolutionary perspective of resilience and argues that reconstruction planning is a contested and politically laden field for different stakeholders, such that social aspect resilience is key to understanding plan implementation. Keywords Disaster resilience · Reconstruction planning · Implementation · Wenchuan earthquake · China
1 Introduction The sudden outbreak of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in China brought detrimental casualty and economic loss on the disaster-affected areas, resulting in 69,227 deaths and causing a total direct economic loss of 845.1 billion Chinese yuan (Xing and Xu 2011). Immediately after the earthquake, reconstruction was proposed and planned, enabled through a sophisticated top–down policy framework (Shao and Xu 2017). Reconstruction planning and its pertinent issues have also drawn the attention of interested scholars (Ge et al. 2010; Dunford and Li 2011; Yin et al. 2012; Guo 2012; Liu et al. 2014). While their prolific research outputs are very informative and quite insightful, there remains room for further exploration in two main aspects. First, the existing research outputs tend to simplify or neglect the barriers against and complex conflicts amidst reconstruction plan implementation. In the politically laden reconstruction environment involving different stakeholders, we should never underestimate the difficulty of implementing reconstruction plans. Second, there tends to be a lack of theorization. These intriguing details of reconstruction * Yiwen Shao [email protected] 1
School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China
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Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
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planning should have been raised in a more logically consistent and convincing manner, aligned with a clear theoretical construct. To echo aforementioned insufficiencies in academic inquiry, this paper attempts to offer a critical interpretation on post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction plan implementation, through examining the cases of two typical towns, Weizhou and Yingxiu, in Wenchuan County. It resorts to the resilience conceptualization as the theoretical construct, and applies a nine-attribute analytical framework. Resilience, the system capability of coping with uncertainties, has been widely recognized and becomes strategic ag
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