Investigating the role of Neighborhood Reconstruction on post-disaster healing of Psychosocial Outcomes after the 2003 Bam Earthquake

Disaster resilience is a complex and multi-dimensional concept whose psychosocial aspects become more uncertain in relation to physical reconstruction. Since one of the most important effects of a disaster is the psychosocial consequences that lead to disruptions in the survivors' individual and collective lives, this article investigates the impact of different aspects of neighborhood reconstruction and its relationship with the traumatic socio-psychological consequences after the earthquake.

For evaluation, Khajeh Murad Neighborhood after the 2003 Bam Earthquake was selected as the case study. The research hypotheses, including one main hypothesis and three sub-hypotheses, were measured by a quantitative approach through the formulation of a two-part questionnaire assessing different aspects of neighborhood reconstruction and the standard questionnaire of post-traumatic stress disorder and its associated social consequences.

According to the results of the analysis, there is a significant and inverse relationship between different aspects of neighborhood reconstruction and psychosocial consequences of the earthquake. Thus, with the increasing quality and resilience of reconstruction, the psychosocial consequences of the earthquake also heal or reduce. Also, based on the findings of sub-assumptions, increasing the quality of physical reconstruction of residential environment, natural landscapes and collective memories have significant and inverse relationship with social-psychological consequences of the earthquake. In contrast, this relationship was not seen in the case of public utilities and neighborhood infrastructure.

In the healing or decreasing psychosocial consequences of disaster, the scale of neighborhood reconstruction has a different impact on survivors. Also, tangible components at these scales have a different effect than intangible components. It turned out that the socio-psychological resilience of communities depends on resilience reconstruction of housing, neighborhood and social and ecological landscapes.