Planning challenges for housing and built environment recovery after the Great East Japan Earthquake: Collaborative planning and management go beyond government-driven redevelopment projects

Abstract

The author defines post-disaster as the process of restoring survivors’ living and enhancing the sustainability and resilience of the built environment. It thus appear that close attention must be paid to transformation of built environment which is formed by aggregation of human habitation and housing reconstruction. What became visible after 5 years since tsunami is that individual relocation actions and collective resettlement policy lead to “polarization” between mountainside new residential area and lowland tsunami-affected area, the latter still remain checkerboard housing recovery situation even if the area are outside of hazardous zone, in which new residential building is restricted. Increase of unmanaged vacant properties and its scattered distribution destroys their built environment and community, and gives negative influence for people who decided in-situ housing reconstruction. Local government recovery planning in Tohoku is too limited to tsunami risk reduction such as land raising and collective relocation by redevelopment projects, but lacks planning technique in repopulating and regenerating neighborhoods with “spatial and temporal continuity” between pre-disaster and post-disaster. One of the alternative planning method is “collaborative planning and management” that go beyond government-driven redevelopment project which utilizes and coordinating residents’ motivation to regenerate housing stock and land use management in their neighborhoods. Planning should not ignore peoples’ resilience to improve their built environment and private sector’s vitality in pre-disaster recovery planning with a sense of economic rationality which retain continuity between normal and catastrophe.