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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]

• Discovery of women's leadership roles as rescuers, decision makers and breadwinners. • Empowering women's leadership will reduce vulnerability and advance resiliency. • Supporting gender equality engagement for communities affected by disasters. • Examination of women's leadership at three post-disaster stages of their lifespans. Community engagement in disaster risk reduction activities assists women to discover and build their capacity for leadership before, during, and after disaster. In the study of the entire process after an extreme event, previous research has been scarce in the examination of women of different ages' capacities of engagement, leadership, and resilience. Developed during 10 years of ongoing research after the Wenchuan earthquake, this paper employs qualitative research methodology that scrutinizes women's leadership at different stages of their lifespans during all the post-disaster stages (emergency rescue, short-term reconstruction, and long-term recovery and mitigation) that took place after the Wenchuan earthquake, in the rural areas of Sichuan Province, China. This paper discovers that (1) during the emergency rescue stage, women became rescuers augmenting and supporting the urgent response; (2) during the short-term reconstruction stage, women served as decision makers guiding the reconstruction of housing and communities; and (3) during the long-term recovery and mitigation stage, many women took on the role of breadwinner, managing the family livelihood and long-term development. From the perspective of built environment, this paper argues that women's leadership in managing existing and obtaining new resources (internal and external), in parallel effort alongside the official missions, not only strengthened the men's dominant aftermath efforts, but also promoted gender equity engagement in post-disaster reconstruction and recovery as well as powerfully advanced resilience capacity at individual, family, and community levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]