Rethinking Community Generation in Disaster Public Housing in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake: The Logic of Support Activities by Neighborhood Associations, Community Center and Land Developer.

In the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, disaster victims have already moved from temporary housing to permanent housing. It is a few years after this movement that especially in the tsunami-affected urban areas, middle-aged and middle-income victims in disaster public housing came to be replaced into low-income and unaffected people owing to the income cap. In the course of time, it was questioned whether disaster public housing should be for victims or for needy people. Thus, residential associations were becoming weak year by year, and the community generation is required again in disaster public housing. Since the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, Japanese sociologists have not sufficiently argued the community generation in disaster public housing in contrast to temporary housing. Moreover, trends of sociological studies changed from descriptions of the community generation based on the qualitative investigation into analyses of the residents' sense of their recovery based on the quantitative one. Now that the number of disaster volunteers was decreased and that the very disaster public housing is becoming like a welfare institution, sociologists should explore another way of the community generation. This paper takes up a disaster public housing complex "Tago Nishi Saigai Kouei Jutaku" in Sendai-City, Miyagi-Prefecture and illustrates the process of supporting the community generation in the past decade by neighborhood associations near the complex, by the community center and by the land developer. The development project of Tago Nishi district, started in 1990s but to be stagnant, was accelerated by the reconstruction from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. In Tago Nishi District, there were four blocks provided for disaster victims, and Tago Nishi disaster public housing complex was built in one of those blocks. Thinking of this case, we can divide three subjects and logics of supporting the community generation. One is the support network organized by neighborhood associations before victims moved into the complex. This network constructed human relationships inside the complex to form a residential association. Another subject is the community center, which holds hobby and sports activities to facilitate relationships among people in Tago Nishi district. The other is the land developer, which opened a free space to interact with each other in order to promote relationships between people in Tago Nishi district and those in its outside. The community generation seen in Tago Nishi disaster public housing complex is summarized as the multiple-layered, medium- to long-term one. Neighborhood associations made a formal organization during an early stage, and both the community center and the land developer are, based on this foundation, trying to create various informal groups. It is true that the approach of neighborhood associations is different from that of the community center and the land developer; the former is instrumental and the latter consummatory, but both approaches are complementary in the community generation of disaster public housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]