Reconstruction Plans and Planning Process After the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami - Post-Tsunami Hazard: Reconstruction and Restoration - page 24

use and the size of new settlements. Municipalities therefore conduct meticulous
and frequent surveys about people's expectations.
Many projects were planned in the chaotic and uncertain period shortly after the
disaster. Some of them demonstrated that the size of the new settlements is exces-
sive with respect to the real demand, especially in the case of on-site land readjust-
ment projects. In Ishinomaki city, for example, these sorts of projects are planned in
four districts. However, most of the local residents want to sell their land and move
to the inland, which is safer considering future tsunamis. Only 20-30 % of them
want to rebuild their houses where they lived. 7 It is thus foreseen that many lots will
remain vacant after the accomplishment of the project and the improvement of the
urban facilities with considerable expense. This will lead to new ineffi cient settle-
ments with extremely low density of scattered houses.
New sort of project, which will solve such a problem, should have been devel-
oped before the disaster and, at least in the planning process of the project, the
preferred developing areas should have been selected with a strategy of “selective
concentration” in order to prevent useless public investment in infrastructures.
In addition to the quantitative aspects mentioned above, there are also some
problems in the qualitative aspects of the planning process. An aforementioned
inadequacy is the insuffi cient attention to the historical aspects. However, the munic-
ipal authorities do not intend to modify the contents of the plans with the excuse of
the fi rst, provisory stage that is the same plan already explained to the local residents
and one, which will never be modifi ed.
Although speed is a very important factor to be considered in the reconstruction
planning process, especially in the case of industrial recovery, the adequacy in the
size of the settlements and their quality is sometimes underestimated.

2.5.3 Attention to the “Future” in the Planning Process

Those settlements, developed by the reconstruction projects, will be likely to decline
shortly after their accomplishment, as the population of the region will decrease and
this trend will even accelerate because of an aging society. It is therefore important
to consider the shrinkage of the population since the beginning of the planning
process.
From this perspective, the fi rst step should be the development of existing sites
in the undamaged settlements, as many of these sites are already witnessing a
declining process with many vacant lots and houses available to host people. If a
relocation site is planned out of the undamaged settlement, both new and old
settlements will eventually remain with many vacant lots and houses.
In some cases, they made well-planned relocation project in with this concept
meaning. Norinowaki district in Miyako city, is a clear example of this
case (Fig. 2.6 ). It will not move to the higher land independently, but move to the