1. Airdropped urban condominiums and stay-behind elders' well-being: 10-year lessons learned from the post-wenchuan earthquake rural recovery.
- Author
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Wu, Haorui
- Subjects
BUILT environment ,WELL-being ,RURAL planning ,EARTHQUAKES ,RURAL development ,CONDOMINIUMS ,URBAN planning - Abstract
The extremely rapid and fundamental reshaping of socioeconomic structures in rural China produced a wave of left-behind children and stay-behind elders (SBEs). Although the wellness of the children has been examined through research and practice, the plight of the elderly in a swiftly urbanizing built environment has rarely been studied. After the Wenchuan earthquake, urban condominiums were swiftly erected in rural Sichuan. These multi-storied structures, presenting minimal correlation with local societal environment, were disparagingly referred to as airdropped urban condominiums (AUCs) by local residents. This 10-year qualitative research examined the influence of AUCs on the SBEs' overall well-being in various aspects during the long-term post-earthquake recovery, by assessing 22 SBEs from 11 rural communities in the worst-hit areas in Sichuan. In addition to hampering the elders' mobility, the AUCs interrupted the SBEs' original rural lifestyle, endangered their social connections and social networks, destroyed their traditional agriculture-based livelihoods, and weakened their political agency. The cumulative vacuum of these cultural, social, economic, and political capitals further jeopardizes their overall well-being. This research provides evidence-based reconstruction strategies to inform rural revitalization planning and policy/decision making, especially in the settings that were swiftly redeveloped post-disaster. The community-driven and community-engagement planning and design approach plays a seminal role in rural redevelopment discourse of better serving SBE and other vulnerable and marginalized groups. • Examines the influence of urban condominiums on rural stay-behind elder's overall well-being. • Informs swiftly rural revitalization planning and policy making in post-disaster setting. • Transfers the stay-behind elder from a societal descriptor into a seminal element in rural renewal. • Promotes community-driven and community engagement approaches in rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
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