International Team of Planners Looks at Kobe's Recovery
by David Mammen
A few months after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, IPA was asked to assemble two international teams to advise on the recovery of Kobe, Japan. Urban planners from the U.S., Sweden, England, Singapore, Korea, China and Japan visited Kobe for briefings, discussions and site visits to the damaged areas. The teams made several suggestions for recovery efforts at public meetings attended by the Mayor, Governor, and members of the Prime Minister's Reconstruction Committee. (Detailed suggestions are contained in a Japanese-language report, copies of which are available from IPA.)
IPA's international team is briefed on the plans for Kobe's reconstruction.
Seen from the international perspective, the earthquake revealed "faults" in some of Japan's underlying frameworks and systems, including complicated layers of land ownership and tenure, and a pattern of intergovernmental relations that gives a strong hand to central government bureaucrats at the expense of local initiative. Our teams urged that in the process of recovery and reconstruction, new ideas about the implications of these underlying frameworks be considered.
During our site visits, we found evidence of local efforts already following these recommendations. Our teams were tremendously impressed by the grassroots community development that we observed. In the Uozaki neighborhood, for example, committees of local residents and volunteer professionals were taking a comprehensive approach to emergency response, demolition and recovery. Kobe municipal government has nurtured these efforts. In the months and years ahead, these committees will be valuable partners for the government in recovery efforts.
Kobe's earthquake recovery provides a unique opportunity to think more boldly than usual circumstances permit. The extraordinary resources forthcoming for reconstruction should be used as a foundation for the long-term transformation of Kobe. Kobe was already changing before the earthquake, and it will no longer be the same industrial port city. Kobe's transformation should be linked with market forces of globalization, the decline of heavy industry, and the growth of the service sector and tourism. Perhaps the historical moment is approaching when Kobe must reduce its industrial function, and reconstruct its waterfront with more people-centered and environmentally-friendly uses.
From IPA Report, Spring 1996.
David Mammen is President of IPA. He led the two teams which visited Kobe in June and September 1995.