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Earthquake in China, II: The Resilience of Cities

by Sandy Ikeda
Sat, 21 Jun 2008 at 11:14 PM

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I recently blogged in "Earthquake in China I" about the 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province that has left some 5 million persons homeless. Here I'd like to address the resilience of traumatized cities and what role will the government play in the recovery.

(BTW, the Web site of MCEER, the Multi-disciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, is a good source for the latest news about this tragic event. And for the latest on the current flooding in the American Midwest, see here.)

From "The Resilient City," a collection of scholarly essays on how modern cities have recovered from disasters, we get this surprising fact:

Although cities have been destroyed throughout history — sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned — they have, in almost every case, risen again like the mythic phoenix. As one painstakingly thorough statistical survey determined, only forty-two cities worldwide were permanently abandoned following destruction between the years 1100 and 1800. By contrast, cities such as Baghdad, Moscow, Aleppo, Mexico City, and Budapest lost between 60 and 90 percent of their populations due to wars during this period, yet they were rebuilt and eventually rebounded. After about 1800, such resilience became a nearly universal fact of urban settlement around the globe.

Cities are resilient, indeed!

And what about the Chinese government's likely response? The MSNBC article I linked to in that earlier post mentions that only 5% of China's population has property insurance, so the rebuilding will undoubtedly involve government mega-projects on a daunting scale, even for the People's Republic. In the past, the government has shown a level of heavy-handedness that would probably appall even Robert Moses. An earthquake in 1976 destroyed Tangshan, near Beijing, killing at least 240,000 of its 1 million residents. According to "The Resilient City": "Within a decade, Chinese officials rebuilt the city in a maze of six-story concrete housing projects."

So the question (from "Earthquake I") remains: to what extent will the rebuilt settlements promote the re-emergence of the communities displaced (though not destroyed) by the earthquake?

Some of the results from the Mercatus Center studies on Hurricane Katrina, "Crisis and response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina" are informative, which you can find here. I would draw your attention in particular to the the papers by Emily Chamlee-Wright on the importance of voluntary community organizations to disaster recovery. While local, state, and federal agencies were dithering after Hurricane Katrina, private groups, such as the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Catholic Church, almost single-handedly rebuilt their East New Orleans neighborhoods. To the extent that the Chinese government respects and utilizes existing social networks such as these (along with economic assistance), they will promote genuine recovery from the devastation of the Sichuan Earthquake. Less top-down planning enabling more bottom-up initiative.

Today's China is sometimes characterized as "go-go" or "unfettered" capitalism. How the government responds to the earthquake is thus a test of this characterization. In terms of formal institutions, of course, the bedrock of capitalism is private property, freedom of contract, and the rule of law, which when combined foster (among other things) both economic growth and disaster recovery. That may be asking too much of the Chinese Communist Party, of course. But mature capitalism also consists of social capital, i.e., networks of trust and reciprocity, that arise spontaneously and enable trade and other kinds of productive public interaction among strangers to take place. This seems to have to have emerged, albeit slowly, in China since the 1980s.

So, will the government resist heavy-handedness and to let the communities rebuild themselves, providing assistance but not taking the familiar mega-project route? Unfortunately, I doubt the PRC will pass the test.

***

"The Resilient City" contains a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which I'd like to end with.

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

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