2015年度 学術交流支援資金 海外の大学等との共同学術活動支援

(プロジェクトNo.1-4 環境と開発のジオインフォマティクス)

報告書

プロジェクト代表　厳　網林

環境情報学部教授　兼政策・メディア研究科

Toward A Cultural City of Kesennuma From 3.11 in Tohoku Japan

Charrette Design Workshop on the Reconstruction of Matsuiwa-Omose Area

Wanglin Yan

Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

Keio University

1. Introduction

Kesennuma City is a city located at the central of Sanriku costal region and the northeast corner of Miyagi Prefecture with 334 km² of land and 65,430 population (2015/09). The ria landscape forms the most part of the city with serrated coastal lines, drowned valleys, and deep bays beneficiary for aquaculture, especially oysters and scallops. Fishery industry provides major job chances for the city itself and the region. In the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, an earthquake registering nearly 6 on the Japanese seismic scale (comparable with Richter scale from 1 to 6) was measured in the city center area, and nearly 5 in Motoyoshi area, the south part of the city. The tsunami subsequently swept the bay area, landed big ships, flooded the downtown and main business districts. Leaked oil from the broken tanks induced disastrous fires burnt Shishiori, another population dense area. The city as a whole counted 1359 casualties, including 220 missing persons and 108 related-deaths, damaged 15,815 houses and 9500 families.

The big fire and the landed ship in in Shishiori demonstrated the severity of the disaster. Half year later after the event, the city authorized the Reconstruction plan in October of 2013. The Master plan set the goal of reconstruction in ten years while the first 5 years is intensive reconstruction period for a safe, workable, livable, sustainable, joyful, slow and smart city in 10 years. The master plan was embodied by seven pillars: reconstruction of the infrastructure, rehabilitation of disaster management, renewal of industry, restoration of nature-human dynamics, enhancement of healthcare and wellness, improvement of learning and education, and promotion of community activities, with 31 sub-projects in total. For the realization of the plan, it calls for cooperation of all stakeholders including citizens, industrials, government and NPOs etc.

Fig.1 Layout of Kesennuma City and the targeted area

Five years has passed, and the city has been gradually recovering. The rubles were cleaned in first three years, and the road infrastructures are in reconstruction. The low land in city center were readjusted and elevated for industrial and commercial activities while the reconstruction of other inundated areas are largely delayed. The inundated low lands under the tsunami line are regulated for residence. Citizens who lived there have three choices: 1) move to higher land if land is available personally and affordable for a detached houses by themselves independently; 2) relocate to higher land collectively if land is available by group and affordable for a detached house independently; 3) relocate to a unit of city-owned condominiums in cheap rent. While the projects of relocation are steadily progressed, the reconstruction of inundated areas is largely delayed, particularly the land out of city center. This is partly because of capacity of human and financial resources. The main reason of delay comes from the uncertainty of the land use policy. What to rebuild in the remote and shrinking city? The population of the city has decreased by 9.4% in recent five years after the disaster.

The District of Matsuiwa, the target area of this workshop, is one of such an areas. The district is located 5km south of the city center. The houses along the coast and the river were swept away by the tsunami. The shrine of Ozaki at the cape is located on a top of a hill where more than 30 evacuees survived. Enunkan, a historical house of Ayukai family since Edo era and also the home of Mr. Naofumi Ochiai, a famous Japanese literature in Meiji era, just sits at the north above the tsunami line, in front of the bay with a beautiful Japanese garden and a nice view of the harbor.

Fig.2. The historical house of Enunkan	Fig.3 The Shrine of Ozaki that saved 30 evacuees from Tsunami
Fig.4 Before the tsunami	Fig.5 After the tsunami

Even with such a nice location and rich cultural-natural resources the municipality owns no idea about the reconstruction of the area. Previous residents, landowners and citizens are interested in rebuilding the district as a compound zone for recreation, learning, and communication. They have started to talk and have developed some ideas. They do not know how to represent the ideas professionally in harmony with the landscape and culture, and how the ideas could be implemented and contribute to the future of the city. This might be the good chance to reconstruct the area with participation of public through bottom up process. In context, a design charrette was organised to design a reconstruction plan with participation of experts and local residents during Sep 7 to 11, 2015. The aims of this workshop are:

1) Understanding the demands, wishes and interests of the people (residents and outsiders)

2) Work together with the people in co-creation (residents and outsiders)

3) Develop a plan for a future vision of the region

4) Design the pathways and spatial alignments of Matsuiwa District

5) Making recommendations for implementation of the plan and the design

2. Processes of the workshop

The charrette workshop was held over four consecutive days, from August 31 to September 3, 2015 at Kesennuma King’s Village (Matsuzaki-omose 17-1). It is organized by Keio University incorporated with Swinburne University of Technology, VHL University of Applied Sciences, and EME Design under the support of Association of UNESCO Kesennuma, and Association of Livable City Kesennuma, and Australia Japan Foundation.

The schedule of the workshop is summarized in Table 1. Residents and local activists were invited to participate in a “30 x 30 Exercise” in the evening of August 31, and a participative design workshop in the evening of September 3. Geographic data and documents about the area were prepared beforehand for experts. Experts and participants stayed at the facility, which is located in the design area, easy to walk around and talk with local people.

Table 1 Process of the charrette workshop

The 30 x 30 Exercise is essentially a brainstorming session with local residents and experts reflecting together on how the region was 30 years in the past and how it could become 30 years in the future (Roggema 2013). A total of 30 participants broke into four groups and gathered around the tables bearing signs indicating four themes: Population, Economics, Culture, and Environment. They discussed the situation 30 years ago, wrote key words on “sticky notes,” and placed them on aerial photographs. Several minutes of brainstorming was allowed for each theme, with the post-it notes left on the maps. The participants subsequently moved to the next table and added ideas during a seven-minute brainstorm about their second topic. Eventually, all participants conducted a brainstorm on each of the four themes. Finally, the team leaders at each table presented a three-minute summary at each table of the results up to that point. Through this process, each group reconfirmed things such as what existed in the area in the past, what was lost, and what should be kept for the future. The output of this process is summarized in Table 2. It is full of messages about the natural and cultural resources.

The second round of 30*30 Exercise is used for participants to picture the future of the area in 2045. The participants were separated into four groups and each group was assigned at a table with aero photo as base map. Each group is required to draw their ideas on the base map for the reconstruction by using the resources discussed in previous session. At the end each group had 5min to present their proposals.

Fig. 6 30*30 Exercise and design proposals from participants

3. Design by expert team

The 30*30 exercise was the first time for residents from different districts in this area to talk about the past and future together. It collected rich information about the natural and cultural resources of the study area.

3.1 Understandings of the area

The design area is located at the mouth of Omose River, a second-order river maintained by Miyagi Prefecture. The two sides of the river belongs to different administrative district, Matsuiwa District on left side and Omose District on right side. Each district was composed of many communities with individual history. Depending on the loss and damage during the tsunami, the residents demonstrates different responses. The Ozaki area in Omose District where all of the houses were swept and most the citizens evacuated to the temporary houses in a same evacuation site moved speedily. Their lands was fully bought up by the municipality, a sport park is going to be build. Situation in Matsuiwa District was quite complicated. The tsunami line encroached residence and farmlands inland and separated the communities in low land and upland. Afraid of the damage of tsunami, inundated families has given up to live there and moved their houses to higher lands. There is a big difference of concerns toward the reconstruction of the low land. Except tsunami disasters, the area is prone to flood. A large part of the area was under the sea level. The residence so far was protected well-developed drainage systems and a pump station. Therefore, the reconstruction should not only think about the protection from the sea but also the risks from mountains. The design area at the river mouth should be considered by river basin, crossing the administrative zones.

The development of the area origin to the Enunkan, the old house of Ayukai family and Japanese Linguist Naofumi Ochiai. The ancestor of the family was a vassal of Date Domain and moved from Yamagawa Prefecture 500 years ago. The old house Enhunkan, the family shrine Hachiban Shrine standing at the terrace of hills, and Ozaki Shrine at the cape of Ozaki area compose a gold triangle of the landscape of the area. People who have lived in the area for hundreds of years have been fishing in the sea, cultivate the paddy fields, excavated gold in mountains, and lumbered timbers in forest, and developed a lot of folk tales and traditional activities. The reconstruction of the design area should be placed in the historical and ecological context of the entire from coast to the upper streams of rivers and mountains.

As the gateway to the city center from south coastal part of the prefecture, multiple reconstruction projects at regional scale pass through the area. Sanriku Highway from Sendai City to Iwate Prefecture cut through the west of the area with an interchange. The national route 26 runs through the coastal line from south to north under the Hachiban Shrine. One side of river dire is in reconstruction from the fishery harbor to upper stream of Omose River till the national route. All of the civil engineering projects are rebuilt on the elevated basement higher than 10.0m, the height of the last tsunami. The limited space of the area is going to be gridded by giant concrete bodies with sunken between the grid. Each of the projects is planned and constructed by different administrative agencies with collaboration each other. The projects are planned and designed only to meet the specification of engineering, lack of consideration of the harmonization with nature and culture. Local communities and residents, the people who know the situation, are outcasted from the process.

3.2 Concept of the design

The 30*30 Exercise and the field tours, the design team understood that the area has rich natural and cultural resources; it was a prone to disasters of tsunami and flood; reconstruction projects are ongoing in part of the area with harmonization and collaboration. What the most important is that we should change our mindsets from protection from disaster to adapt to disasters. The design team understood that reconstruction must, 1) remember the past for the future generations; 2) reconnect the sea with mountains; 3) reform the rigid protection-based reconstruction to resilient reconstruction by adaptive planning. The first one, remember, is self-evident in a post-disaster reconstruction. Many cities have reserved damaged buildings and ruins in memorial parks as materials for disaster education. However, the implementation of the idea and utilization of the facilities are context-dependent. We believe that the memorial should not be the decoration or an exhibition of the history. It must be the life of the people. The contents, the scale, and the location should be considered in social ecological systems of the area. This comes to the second idea reconnect. The design area is a flood plain at the mouth of Omose river. The development of the flood plain backed to the gold mining the upper stream of the river, which shapes the landscape largely, and reserved a lot of stories in the gold rush time. The most famous one is the tale of Oiran, a beautiful girl who made up by the flourish water of Omose River as perfume to serve served gold miners. Many other local stories are inherited in this region. Moreover, a collective relocation project is ongoing in 2km upper stream. Most of the residents of the collective housing district are those who lived in the design area. Therefore, the sustainability of the river mouth must be considered with the river basin together. The realization of this idea requires the third point: reform. The disaster is a window for the area to rebuild transformatively. Reconstruction projects should be placed in the social-ecological system of the area in harmonized with nature and culture. This requires reform of reconstruction concepts, reform of administration and reform of people’s mindsets. Reconstruction is not simply resuming the situation before the disaster. It must be the construction for the development of next generations. It will be a starting point of a new story, which reflected the lessons we learnt, and the prospect we look for. Rather than the area itself, we should stand at the scale of the whole city or above to think about what the area should be like, who should be involved, what the functions should be included, and how it could be realized. Landscape design is a platform to collect fragmented information, place them on the table, realign them spatially, and communicate with people for realization.

3.3 Design

Considering the geographic location, we set the goal of the reconstruction is to rebuild the area as a complex of creative culture with a combination of diverse components harmonized with En-unkan, Hachiban Shrine, Ozaki Shrine and the bridge of Sanriku Highway with Oshima in background. These components are,

1) Old stories and new stories related to remember,

(1) Cherry line planted along tsunami line

(2) A 93.3*93.3m² memorial park embedded with the streets before the disaster of the area in 1 to 10 scale

(3) Use of debris material to shape the old street patterns and house locations/foundations

(4) Think water as a friend to live with and give it more space to absorb risks by traducing water into the ground 0 area.

(5) Receive and downsize floods by dissipative structure of coasts

2) Reactivating natural and cultural resources by reconnect,

(1) visually anchor Enunkan - Hachiban Shrine - Ozaki Shrine, and the new monument as a diamond of the landscape

(2) Connect the hinterland with the seaside by extending the hills to the sea and allow water inlands

(3) Mitigate flooding from mountains by widening the streams

(4) Create history sites (cat stone, mirror stone), along the route inland

(5) Ask relocated people to garden their former house in excavation zone

(6) Bicycle path, connecting hills, historic story-points with new monument, shrines and sports park

3) Embrace regional infrastructure for implementation by reform,

(1) Use the levee in construction along Omose River as access promenade to the central square

(2) Build bus stop and parking at the intersection of the national route and the levee as entrance

(3) Shape up the beach with sports park including football, tennis, baseball, swimming with amphi-theatre for spectators

(4) Allow relocated people to garden their former house (vegetables, flowers)

Fig.6 The landscape design: Remember, Reconnect, Reform (Central Area)

Fig.7 The Landscape Design (The entire Area)

3.4 Communication with participants

The residents’ design workshop was held at the end of the design charrette process. The findings of the design team were presented in a presentation to the group, then a plasticine model was created to show the impacts of the design in three dimensions, and finally a participatory design workshop was held with citizens.

1) Presentation preparation

In the preparation process for the presentation the overall design process was reviewed, which helped to clarify the message of the design proposal. Through the 30 x 30 Exercise, the flow of the process became clear. Participants had the opportunity to “remember” the experience and history of area. The design for reconstruction from the disaster presents the opportunity for the regional natural and cultural intrinsic to be “reconnected”. After remember and reconnect, the “Reform” can occur. By “reform” two aspects are meant. First, the people reform the way of living for sustainability, and second, people could physically reform to their land by collaboration. This conceptual approach was presented to the residents, and then, in order to incorporate the residents’ perspectives, three-dimensional models were created using plasticine to visualize the outcomes.

2) Visualizing the design concepts using three-dimensional models

Plasticine is useful as a tool to express the ideas of participants (Roggema, Vos, & Martin, 2014). Using plasticine, which is available everywhere, participants could visualize the connections between the spatial components of identity in the region, and they could design their desired configurations of added and existing landscape elements. The landscape elements that were designed on paper suddenly become three-dimensional. Anyone can easily join, because of the common childhood experience of playing with clay, the material is inexpensive, and it facilitates dynamic communication.

3) Design workshop

A participatory design workshop was held at the Ota Community Center. The participants consisted of the same groups as in the 30 x 30 Exercise. Before the workshop, the design proposals, the landscape plan, and a demonstration of the plan by plasticine models were presented and exhibited at the venue. At the start of the workshop, the design team gave a presentation on the theme of “Remember, Reconnect, Reform.” After questions and answers, participants were divided in four groups and asked to use the plasticine to express how they envision a plan for reconstruction, on top of aerial photos (Fig.8). Because of the fact that the participants were informed and saw the experts’ designs and the three-dimensional models in advance, the workshop went smoothly. Students, workers, and seniors, all generations from various occupations, worked together as unified teams to think about the region’s future, expressing their ideas by use of plasticine and placing the items physically on the aerial photograph. It was a dynamic exercise, with participants adjusting each other’s creations and their spatial relationships. Some participants asserted their ideas strongly and sought agreement from everyone, while others yielded more and made an effort to consolidate the discussions. All of the teams were keen to develop their plans. This session was an important opportunity for communication and to understand what others were thinking.

At the end, each team leader made a presentation, explaining the spatial alignment and proposal developed by the group. For many students from local high school this was the first time to participate in such a design game and to speak in front of a group of people. They proudly introduced their team’s work and they felt happy with such a positive experience.

Fig.7 Plasticine Model made by participants

Fig.8 Participants are working together

Fig.8 Close-up of the plasticine model

4. Discussion and Conclusions

It was first time to hold the participate workshop for the reconstruction in Matsuiwa Area which bring people together from different district. Last plan has been made with the help of Tohoku Gakuin University and delivered to the municipality four years ago. At that time, 95% of the residents have chosen to move to higher lands while only 2.5% of residents selected to return. Without request from residents, the municipality cannot do anything. On the other hand, residents thought that they have sent their requests and the city government should have move on. Unfortunately, nothing has happened during the period.

The design proposal was built on the analysis of the situation at the regional scale and river basin scale. Participants of the workshop were delightful to see an alternative from the conventional one, a simple collection of infrastructure projects and the requests of residents. By change of ideas, the city could be safer, livable and smarter.

It is surprised that the participants showed strong concerns on cultural and recreational facilities while the safety was not touched very much in the preliminary design and final design workshop. This may reflect that residents would take the safety granted even in a city not long after a disaster. On the other hand government has paid more attention on safety issue by swift reconstruction of levee and the elevation of roads. This difference might be the reason of the gaps between residents and municipality. Participative design workshop is effective to visualize all of the projects and information in one map.

Acknowledgements

This project is granted by Academic Exchange Grants of the Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University in fiscal year 2015. The charrette design workshop was supported by the Associate of Sumiyosa Kesennuma City. We are grateful for King’s Garden Miyagi Ltd to provide us the accommodation of King’s Village during the workshop.

Roggema, R., Vos, L., & Martin, J. (2014). Resourcing local communities for climate adaptive designs in Victoria, Australia. Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment, 12(3), 210–226. doi:10.1080/10042857.2014.934951