The city, as an accumulation of artifacts, has been endowed with a variety of meanings and values derived from the activities of the people who pass through it. Especially in a city with such a long history as Kyoto, the majority of the artificial environment surrounding our lives was created in the past by someone other than ourselves. Therefore, the meaning and value of the artificial environment is layered and laminated. However, in today’s society, we feel that the distance between people and their environment is becoming more and more distant in exchange for the increased convenience and comfort that comes with modernisation. If this is the case, how can we approach the meaning and value of the environment again, and regain a relationship that allows us to “interact” (=cooperate) with the environment, including non-human (objects)?
The process of disaster ‘recovery’ is fraught with conflicts of value and meaning. In other words, there are a lot of issues in the recovery process that we can’t say is the right answer. Since it is impossible to settle on a single correct answer, we would like to bring together people from all walks of life to explore these issues from Kobe, 26 years after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, while flexing our words, memories and feelings.
My lecture at the Tomoyuki Gondo Laboratory (Department of Architecture, Graduate School of Engineering) in the University of Tokyo was summarized in the note of the Gondo Laboratory.
Among the terraced-type disaster public housing in the three prefectures affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, we selected the housing complex that adopted the hybrid access, and show the actual situation of the recovery of the commonality of the inhabitants. We focused on the reflexivity that lifestyle affects the environment after reconstruction. We confirmed that the common space and the buffer space inside and outside the house are the keys to meet the needs of the inhabitants who want to interact while maintaining a certain sense of distance. In order for the introduction of the common space to function, we pointed out that in addition to the design and arrangement of the buffer space, it is important to stabilize the way of living by the arrangement and circulation of the space inside the house.
This paper focuses on the Sustainable Township Development Program (STP), an urban regeneration project that has been underway since the late 1990s in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, to examine how the relationship between people resettled from slums and the land is changing. In this paper, we focus on the link between people’s practices and the processes of “purification” and “translation” in modernization, as proposed by anthropologist Bruno Latour. Specifically, we will depict how people, confronted with the “ladder” of housing (legal land ownership, high-rise housing units) as a means of “purification”, reconfigure their relationships, including their relation to the land, as they try to adapt to their environment while being at the mercy of changing circumstances.