Disasters and the Built Environment: Understanding the Potential and Pitfalls of Urban Planning in Post-Disaster Recovery

Author(s):  
Traci Birch ◽  
Isaac Henry ◽  
Marla Nelson
2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 422-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takaaki Kato ◽  
◽  
Itsuki Nakabayashi ◽  
Taro Ichiko ◽  

The past post-disaster recovery process had many difficulties in planning. The importance of residents participatory urban planning is true of post-disaster planning and ordinary planning; however, there are difficult problems as follows: time-scale conflict between desire of affected households for swift recovery of their individual lives and enough consideration of urban planning to avoid speed-before-quality planning, unsmooth discussion and consensus building because of mutual conflict of their interest in the residents, and a shortage of professionals in the case that an earthquake disaster hits wide and high-density urbanized region. The concept of "pre-disaster planning" has been propounded as measures to deal with these serious situations after 1995 Hyogo-ken Nambu Earthquake in Japan. Actual measures including "neighborhood community-training program for post-disaster recovery" of Tokyo Metropolitan have been implemented in various approaches. This study has pioneering approach in this context. We focus on planning support technologies based on a geographic information system (GIS) and establish planning support system for post-disaster community-based urban planning, which will smooth discussion and increase efficiency of planning work. An introduction of the system will result in reduction of total time needed on the planning process and supplement of professionals. Though there are some problems that we identified, they will be solved in accumulated experiences such as the training program in the near future.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fangxin Yi ◽  
Yong Tu

The Wenchuan earthquake, which happened in May 2008 in China, was one of the most destructive natural disasters of the past decade. The Chinese government implemented several aid programs, including the Paired Assistance to Disaster-Affected Areas (PADAA) program, to assist with disaster recovery. Although the Wenchuan earthquake has gained much scholarly attention, previous studies often adopted different recovery measures and provided fragmented empirical evidence on how an aid program may have influenced the recovery process in both the short and long term. To bridge the gap, this paper collects eight social, economic, and institutional indicators to measure four types of recovery processes, namely, economic recovery, social recovery, institutional recovery, and built environment recovery. The data, collected between 2002 and 2015, covers 269 earthquake-stricken counties. Based on this data, we constructed a set of disaster recovery indexes. We then evaluated the impacts of the PADAA program on the disaster recovery process across the 269 counties in both the short and long term. We concluded that the impact of the PADAA program on the post-disaster economic recovery was significant in both the short and long term, whereas its impact on the recovery of the institutional and built environment occurred in the short term. Its impact on post-disaster social recovery was inconclusive.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5608
Author(s):  
Manjiang Shi ◽  
Qi Cao ◽  
Baisong Ran ◽  
Lanyan Wei

Global disasters due to earthquakes have become more frequent and intense. Consequently, post-disaster recovery and reconstruction has become the new normal in the social process. Through post-disaster reconstruction, risks can be effectively reduced, resilience can be improved, and long-term stability can be achieved. However, there is a gap between the impact of post-earthquake reconstruction and the needs of the people in the disaster area. Based on the international consensus of “building back better” (BBB) and a post-disaster needs assessment method, this paper proposes a new (N-BBB) conceptual model to empirically analyze recovery after the Changning Ms 6.0 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China. The reliability of the model was verified through factor analysis. The main observations were as follows. People’s needs focus on short-term life and production recovery during post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction. Because of disparities in families, occupations, and communities, differences are observed in the reconstruction time sequence and communities. Through principal component analysis, we found that the N-BBB model constructed in this study could provide strong policy guidance in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction after the Changning Ms 6.0 earthquake, effectively coordinate the “top-down” and “bottom-up” models, and meet the diversified needs of such recovery and reconstruction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-449
Author(s):  
Elyse Zavar ◽  
Brendan L Lavy ◽  
Ronald R Hagelman

Post-disaster research relating to tourism tends to focus on broad economic measures that can miss local-scale actors and contemporaneous impressions by tourists and tourism-based business owners in places undergoing recovery from a disaster. Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, swept across coastal Texas in August 2017. Many of the communities affected by Harvey have economies largely based on family recreation. Interviews in Rockport–Fulton, Texas, with tourism-oriented business owners, staff, and tourists during the Independence holiday provide qualitatively robust accounts of the community’s first major summer event following Harvey and highlight the importance of social networks and place attachment to bringing tourists to the recovering area. Furthermore, we discuss the chain tourist’s role in the recovery of affected locations and consider strategies to draw on these social networks to increase the number of tourists visiting the recovering communities.


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