Regulating post-disaster reconstruction planning in China: towards a resilience-based approach?

ABSTRACT There has been a growing tendency in recent years to use resilience theory when drawing up guidelines for formulating urban plans. However, restorative resilience analysis, which is the application of resilience thinking to introspect the planning system, has not yet been well addressed in existing academic inquiry. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining whether urban resilience features in China’s reconstruction planning regulation on different geographical levels, using carefully selected proxy resilience attributes. Reconstruction planning legislation and policies (RPLPs) are the focus of this study because they are perceived to play an important potential role in defining normative planning discourses and legitimizing planning practices. The article develops three major arguments. Firstly, while urban resilience does not yet feature explicitly on the agenda for reconstruction planning in China, specifications of RPLPs do convey certain attributes of urban resilience, but in a distorted form which reflects a failure to fully represent the evolutionary resilience perspective. Secondly, these RPLPs enable, at least rhetorically, a highly connected and efficient environment for post-disaster reconstruction efforts across levels and among institutions, especially through the adoption of a multilayered partner support program (PSP). Thirdly, based on the second argument, resilience is more usefully interpreted as a process rather than an outcome, as the performance of planning regulations would suggest. These arguments are elaborated through a case study of reconstruction planning in Wenchuan County following the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake.