Earthquakes occur frequently in rural areas of Sichuan, China, causing huge damage and high mortality. The built environment plays a significant role in providing residents with safe and resilient settlements in such areas. There is yet little research on how rural families in developing countries cope with geological disasters like earthquakes, and how built environmental factors would influence their resettlement choices which would directly affect their quality of life afterward. Urban planning activities should be accompanied by these insights to design and create human-centric resettlements accordingly. In this study, the resettlement choices after three major earthquakes in Sichuan were studied for this reason. Random sampling and face-to-face questionnaire surveys were combined with factor analysis and binary logistic regression to understand the resettlement modes desired by the residents and the influencing factors. The results show that residents who have lived in their current places long and whose houses were not built recently are more likely to choose the in-situ resettlement. Accessibility to employment and public services has a significant impact on residents' choice of in-situ resettlement or reallocated resettlement, and so does the previous resettlement experience. The research results can provide useful suggestions for Chinese rural area post-earthquake resettlement planning following a human-centric approach with empirical data.@en

Residents’ satisfaction with post-disaster reconstruction in earthquake-stricken areas directly affects their quality of life, which cannot be ignored in post-disaster reconstruction. More than 10 years after the Wenchuan earthquake, we took ten randomly selected villages in the five areas hardest-hit by the Wenchuan earthquake as research objects and obtained 483 valid completed questionnaires. The villagers were randomly sampled and descriptive statistical analysis, factor analysis, and ordered logistic regression were used to explore the factors and relationships influencing villagers’ satisfaction with post-disaster reconstruction in Wenchuan earthquake-stricken areas. The results show that: 1) the more rural residents know about the post-disaster reconstruction, the greater their level of satisfaction; 2) the more the annual income of families increases after resettlement, the greater the satisfaction of rural residents with the post-disaster reconstruction; 3) six public factors, namely the village committee acts as, housing construction quality, public service, policy of benefiting farmers, cultural environment, and hardware environment, all significantly positively affect residents’ overall satisfaction with post-earthquake reconstruction. This study thus enriches the theory of residents’ satisfaction studies and the practice of post-earthquake reconstruction.@en

Earthquake is one of the most serious natural disasters. Taking scientific and reasonable earthquake preparedness measures can effectively reduce casualties and economic losses caused by earthquakes. It is important to understand how residents choose such earthquake preparedness measures to guide them accordingly. However, the current research has failed to address rural areas in developing countries and has inconsistency conclusions for two aspects related to stakeholders involved: the assistance the victims can get from stakeholders for applying earthquake preparedness measures and the trust in stakeholders’ disaster relief abilities. In this study, the rural residents affected by Wenchuan earthquake, Ya’an earthquake and Yibin earthquake were taken as the research objects, and 674 valid questionnaires were obtained through field household surveys. A Multinominal Logit Model (MNL) was constructed to explore the influence of villagers’ trust in the disaster relief ability of stakeholders and the help they can get from stakeholders on their preparedness behavior. The results show that the less trust the villagers have on the government and the community, and the more help they can get from the outside while preparing measures, the more inclined they are to take the disaster preparedness measures. Furthermore, the education level of villagers in earthquake-stricken areas has significant positive impacts on people’s earthquake preparedness behavior. People who are not born in rural areas are more likely to take earthquake preparedness measures. In addition, male, young and married villagers are more likely to take earthquake preparedness measures in their daily lives. This study enriches the theory of rural disaster prevention and mitigation, and provides reference for the practice of disaster prevention and mitigation in earthquake-stricken rural areas.@en