Transition of Urban Form After the Great East Japan Earthquake

Abstract eng:
Five years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, great progress has been made in rebuilding the affected areas. This kind of recovery from a tsunami is generally accompanied by major changes in land use. This paper aims at providing an overview of reconstruction and land use plans and going over the effects and issues posed by such reconstruction from the perspective of land use planning by categorizing the disaster-stricken regions into following four areas; “non-disaster areas,” “collective relocation areas,” “original location reconstruction areas” and “original relocation areas.” The “non-disaster areas” hardly sustained any damage from the tsunami and victims are utilizing the Cliff Program and other programs to look for land on their own and rebuild their homes. In cases where there were designated urbanization promotion areas and urbanization restricted areas, as seen mostly in the metropolis and core city areas based on the City Planning Act, development concentrated around the existing urban centers within the urbanization promotion areas, and thus achieved a highly dense utilization and was able to protect the urbanization restricted areas in the suburban zones. However, in the small and mid-sized cities where they had not made such designations, and in suburban areas where they had much looser restrictions, it was found that development was occurring in a sprawling fashion. In the “collective relocation areas,” in many cases, the municipal governments conducted careful surveys to understand the residents’ intentions and had done their best to match the supply and demand with the number of units available in the relocation residential sites. Thus, for the most part, the residential sites intended for relocation have been filled. However, there are some such relocation residential sites with quite a few vacancies, and with the decline of Japan’s population worsening, the chance of those units ever being occupied is close to zero. In the locations designated as “original location reconstruction areas,” in both cases where land readjustment projects had built infrastructure and raised the ground level for safety, and those areas where no urban development projects took place and in which immediate reconstruction was allowed, since it is taking too much time, or because of the vivid memories of the disaster, the rebuilding process has not progressed and a very low-density urban form is taking shape. In the case of the “original relocation areas,” as there is hardly any demand for non-residential land use, the now open and remaining lands are hardly being utilized. The author concluded there has been progress in creating a denser urban form in some areas in “non-disaster areas” in the urbanized area, partly in accordance with plan and partly without plan, and “collective relocation areas,” which can be evaluated as a more sustainable space. In other locations, however, the reality is that a low-density urban form is taking shape before our eyes. He also pointed to a few potential solutions such as the aggregation of land and the importance of creating a district- or local-level land usage management system.

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