Post-Disaster Rural Revitalization or Spatial Displacement? Rural Resilience, Morphological Transformation and Socio-Cultural Sustainability in Gezin Village, Türkiye

Post-disaster reconstruction is often framed as an opportunity to revitalize rural areas, yet its implications for the social and cultural sustainability of traditional rural morphology and identity remain contested. This study examines the spatial transformation of Gezin village, located on the eastern shore of Lake Hazar in Maden, Elazığ (Türkiye), on the East Anatolian Fault Zone, following the relocation and reconstruction processes triggered by successive earthquakes. Using the Hierarchical Morphological Analysis Method, the pre-disaster traditional settlement and the post-disaster residential areas were compared at the building, structure, parcel/building-block, and macroform levels, drawing on field studies, TOKİ housing plans, Microsoft Building Footprints, HGM orthophotos, and Sentinel-2 land use/land cover data processed in ArcGIS Pro 3.5.0 and QGIS 3.44.11. The findings reveal a two-directional outcome: the transition from adobe and masonry dwellings to reinforced-concrete and light-steel housing increased earthquake resilience at the building scale, but eliminated the production-oriented housing typology—courtyard, barn, hayloft, and storehouse—and replaced the topography-compatible organic fabric with compact, planned blocks. Between 2017 and 2025, built-up areas expanded by about 33% (from 136 to 182 ha), while cultivated land decreased by 66.4 ha and grassland by 73.3 ha. The study concludes that context-detached reconstruction functions as spatial relocation and identity loss, and advocates place-based, sustainable reconstruction approaches.