THE INTANGIBLE ASPECT OF TRANSITIONAL HOUSING : CRITIQUE ON TEMPORARY UNITS IN IWATE, JAPAN

Abstract

Despite the growing literature of disaster response and recovery, many scholars have agreed they are still inadequate and more can be done to improve the outcome of disaster recovery. Furthermore, Japan, a country vulnerable to disasters and a country well-known for its earthquake-resistant structures, has shown in the light of the 2011 tsunami that man are never truly ready in the face of disasters and that every disaster is messy and unpredictable, which brings about new and different issues to resolve. This dissertation seeks to review the situation in the Tohoku region, three years after the 3.11 triple disasters and to raise importance of the need to improve transitional housing, not in terms of quick and efficient construction, but in the intangible and social aspects of temporal architecture such as community and social welfare of the victims. Research was done through available literature, mostly in English, regarding past disaster recovery and the current universal standards of post-disaster shelters. Online articles and personal interviews mainly in Ofunato, Iwate, with survivors who are living in the government-provided temporary housing are used to find out the current situation of the victims, three years after the disaster. The aim of the interviews was to discover the causes of the frustration and depression of the victims which are aggravated by the living conditions the locals are in and how temporal architecture can play a more significant role other than merely providing a shelter. In the reviewed literature, the main guiding rules are efficiency and cost in designing post-disaster shelters, especially for houses that are meant to be temporal. While these are essential, they have unintended consequences on the survivors' well-being, emotionally and to an extent, physically. Through the interviews and my stay in Iwate as a disaster- relief volunteer, it can be seen the supposing short-spanned units do affect the residents physiologically to a great degree. More can be done to improve the planning and design of transitional homes, while bearing in mind the need for efficiency and budget. Three points can be extracted from the interviews - the importance of community, various meeting spaces and better planning and design of the individual units for the psychological well-being of the depressed and traumatised survivors of the disaster.