Introduction

The damaging earthquake risk of communities as the most devastating in terms of impact, but not in terms of likelihood, has specifcally increased over the years due to the increasing complexities in built environments and a high concentrated urbanization in seismic risk-prone areas (Peacock et al. 2008; Olshansky and Chang 2009). The growing largescale devastating efects caused by recent catastrophic earthquakes (e.g., August 15, 2007, Peru; May 12, 2008, Wenchuan, China; January 12, 2010, Haiti; March 11, 2011, Honshu Island, Japan) have attracted the attention of the policy makers to formulate efective risk prevention policies. Some researchers assert that a disaster-resilient community has the ability to cope with the earthquake disasters. And the recovery, which is a fundamental dimension of resilience, can improve the inherent genetic or behavioral characteristics of the communities to better adapt to earthquake disasters (Mooney 2009). The National Disaster Recovery Framework, which is developed by FEMA (2011), defnes the recovery as “those capabilities to assist the afected communities to recover efectively, including, but not limited to, rebuilding infrastructure systems, providing adequate interim and long-term housing for survivors; restoring health, social, and community services; promoting economic development; and restoring natural and cultural resources”. And community recovery has traditionally taken on a more outcome-oriented conceptualization “the outcome of several sets of activities, such as restoring basic services to acceptable levels, replacing infrastructure capacity that is damaged or destroyed, rebuilding or replacing critical social or economic elements of the communities that are damaged or lost, and establishing or reestablishing relationships and linkages among critical elements of the communities” (Alesch et al. 2009). There is currently much of the research literature proposed to measure the community recovery, which has provided two major aspects: (1) returning to pre-disaster conditions and (2) obtaining new normal situations (Chang et al. 2011). The frst aspect emphasizes the comparison of the community condition before and after the earthquake disasters, which recovers to the pre-disaster conditions (Sherrieb et al. 2010). In this sense, the pre-disaster condition of the community is used as the normal status. The rapid recovery process is designed to minimize the recovery time (Alesch et al. 2001). The second aspect highlights the community should recover to a new normal status after an earthquake disaster. The idea of “build back better” (Lyons et al. 2010) or “recover better” is more applicable, indicating the evolution of the development of communities, which is especially indeed possible in the case of developing countries (Mulligan and Nadarajah 2012), because recovery is a multi-dimensional process, encompassing post-disaster activities to rebuild, restore, and reshape those negative physical, social, economic, political, and natural environments, which provides an opportunity for local government to justify the implementation of proactive mitigation strategies and to learn from the previous experience to increase future resilience (Reddy 2000; Birkland 2006). In the recovery process of Wenchuan Community, Chinese Central Government has invested and implemented many recovery programs.