Tamiyo Kondo

Planning Challenges for Housing and Built Environment Recovery After the Great East Japan Earthquake: Collaborative Planning and Management Go Beyond Government-Driven Redevelopment Projects

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.

Experience from the United States: Post-Katrina and Sandy

Land use management in the United States is decided at the local level and not directly controlled by disaster recovery plans and policies. However, disaster mitigation and recovery policies and initiatives are closely connected to and influence land use patterns. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, recovery policies and programs had direct and varied impacts on land use in the affected areas, where, as part of recovery programs after both disasters, government buyouts have been used to purchase houses and property. In terms of implications for land use, the main difference between buyouts after Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy is if programs targeted damaged houses individually or by area. As damaged houses and lots were acquired individually in New Orleans after Katrina, vacant lots were left scattered throughout the city. To avoid similar outcomes after Sandy, New York City focused on property acquisition for redevelopment, and New York State’s buyout programs also targeted clusters of damaged houses and properties in coastal areas. After Sandy, new initiatives to address land use issues and resilience were also introduced through the Rebuild by Design (RbD) program, which began as an unprecedented design competition to consider resilience issues at a regional scale and was funded through a combination of public and private support. In addition to the geographical, political, and development contexts, the timing of Sandy recovery coincides with an ongoing processes of flood map updates and flood insurance reforms, which are closely linked to housing recovery as well as existing and evolving patterns of land use in affected areas.