The Great Hanshin Earthquake:
Urban Revitalization and Environmental Protection

The worst disaster in Japan since the end of the World War II struck the Osaka-Kobe, or Hanshin, region on January 17, 1995, at 5:46 in the morning. The Great Hanshin Earthquake and its aftermath have made manifestly clear the failings of postwar city planning and development. Perhaps the most important lesson that the earthquake has taught us is the fact that the protection of and coexistence with the natural environment are fundamental to urban safety.

The city of Kobe is situated on Osaka Bay. Although the city limits extend well inland, the greater part of the urban and residential sections of Kobe form a strip along the coast of the bay, bordered on the other side by the Rokko Mountains. In the decades prior to the earthquake, the city chiseled away sections of these mountains, using the removed earth to build artificial islands in the bay, and constructed residential subdivisions between mountains. The sale of the land contributed substantially to the municipal treasury, allowing Kobe to forgo excessive grants from the central government and thus maintain its political and administrative independence. Although the "city as real estate developer" is one viable self-defense policy and there is nothing wrong with a municipality having a management philosophy like that found in a corporation, it was not in anyone's best interest to have given Kobe the green light to undertake vast environmental destruction by allowing the city to violate the spirit of the Seto Inland Sea Special Environmental Protection Law, which essentially prohibited the creation of reclaimed land in certain coastal areas, including those around Kobe.

Experts have long warned of the potential dangers to reclaimed land posed by an earthquake: ground subsidence resulting from liquefaction, stranding of people on artificial islands when bridges connecting them to the mainland rupture, the inevitable magnification of a disaster that would arise as a result of the proximity of homes to container ports and workplaces. Indeed, all of these occurred during or after the Great Hanshin Earthquake. As I write this some three months after the disaster, the Portliner, a heavily used passenger rail system connecting the mainland with the artificial Port Island in Osaka Bay, is not yet back in service. Kobe Chuo Municipal Hospital, earlier removed from where it was located by Shin-Kobe Station (after its lot was sold by the city to a Daiei Group-related hotel) to Port Island, became useless when this rail line was severed. The world-famous Kobe container port collapsed, and even when it becomes operational again it is unlikely to be the thriving port it once was. I think it's fair to say that nature took its revenge on us.

In January 1991 I served as the chairman of the plenary sessions of the Second International Conference of Cities on Water, supported by the Italian government and held in Venice, the headquarters of the International Center Cities on Water. At the last plenary session Japanese cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe were roundly criticized for their coastal development activities. It was felt that Japan's major cities were making big mistake by "reclaiming" land at a time when the focus was on global environmental preservation. Of course, Japan isn't the only nation with such projects: New York has its Battery Park, and London is in the midst of a large-scale redevelopment of its Dock Yard. The current trends in waterfront development, however, are harmony between residents and the sea, and protection and restoration of the natural environment. In the Mission Bay development project in San Francisco, for example, citizen participation has resulted in a change from the Battery Park concept of a business district with skyscrapers to the idea of a waterfront neighborhood. The Mission Bay plan calls for a central residential district of low-rise dwellings in which residents will be able to get around on foot, with easy access to a waterfront park; there will be no land reclamation. Office buildings are to be built as far as possible from the shoreline and will be limited to eight stories in height. When land is "reclaimed" in San Francisco Bay, the law requires that an equal area of natural shoreline be restored. This practice is even more advanced in Europe. In Ravenna, Italy, for example, land previously reclaimed by drainage is currently being returned to the sea.

At all events, in this Age of the Global Environment, large-scale land reclamation projects such as those being undertaken in Japan are inexcusable -- irrespective of the possibility of the occurrence of natural disasters. Rather, restoration of the environment should be the focus. And it's not that there is no land available for this. Industrial land in Hyogo Prefecture (whose capital is Kobe), for example, includes a total of 11,000 hectares of unused lots about 500 square meters in size, but none of this land has been restored to a natural state.

What happened in Kobe is bound to happen in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, or elsewhere sometime. We need to stop large-scale environmental destruction; moreover, we need to preserve and restore the environment. In Germany, an average of 30% of the land within cities comprises green areas, including forests and farmland. There is a forest park, the Tiergarten, in the center of Berlin, as well as vast tracts of woodland in the suburbs. Germany has some 500,000 small citizen farms (Klein Garten), many in urban or suburban areas, on specially designated parcels of 240 to 300 square meters, the aggregate area of this is up to 100 times that of similar plots found in Japan. Each parcel has a cottage with electricity and kitchen and bathroom, and owners are required to grow flowering plants, fruits, and vegetables. Although the system was originally developed to enable citizens to supply themselves with food, the farms now also serve as a means of personal recreation. German cities are beautiful as a result of the flowers that cover these small citizen farms.

I believe that, rather than attempting to make a city.

Ultra-earthquake resistant using iron and concrete, we should look at the European way of including rich areas of green in cities, which serves both to preserve the environment and to prevent disasters, as well as to make the city pleasant for people to live. Building cities by preserving and restoring nature is the lesson we should learn from the Great Hanshin Earthquake.