Assistance to the Formation of Settlement Environments

The Town per se, where reconstruction projects and Innovation Coast concept have been promoted, shall be dealt with as a research material to consider settlement environments based on social dynamics analyses and needs understanding based on active communication with local residents, by utilizing quantitative energy monitoring big data obtained in the above II. as well as community energy future visions, in creative collaboration with Japanese graduate students, foreign students, faculty members, researchers, and local residents.

In Shinchi, many reconstruction projects, such as collective resettlement promotion projects against disaster prevention and reconstruction projects of city areas in the vicinity of Shinchi Station, have been currently implemented based on the reconstruction plan, together with the promotion of community development taking advantage of environments in Hamadori District. In terms of the implementation of the reconstruction projects, initiatives in collaboration with residents have rooted, such as “Tsurushi Disaster Prevention Green Space Acorn (Donguri) Project”, and stakeholders as one team have already established local cultures and organizational structures to create new local visions. In the meantime, as for demographic trends in Shinchi, that the number of those who moved out continued to exceed the number of those who moved in since the disaster, the number of those who moved in turned to be more than those who moved out in 2014. It is required to establish methods to grasp the needs of residents, including those who moved in, in details, and to plan and implement policies and measures to form settlement environments.

GSFS has established Graduate Program in Sustainability Science - Global Leadership Initiative, as a center of international education and research regarding Sustainability Science that is an interdisciplinary area to realize sustainable development of local communities, and already achieved quite a number of achievements through educational and research activities there. This underpins GSFS's method of participatory action research in collaboration with public, private, and education in the field to contribute to community development of Shinchi. As part of practices in the education of field-based Sustainability Science, GSFS has achieved educational effects by dispatching students to various areas inside and outside the country, through relevant exercises and classes, such as Global Field Exercise, Exercise on Resilience, Urban Design Studio, Projects on Environment Systems , etc.

In addition, these field exercises have also been functioning as a field study method of Sustainability Science, providing foreign students with fields in Japan where they conquer language barriers, learn about local issues, and contribute to solving those local issues. As part of achievements thus far, Exercise on Resilience has been conducted since the disaster in Otsuchi Town in Iwate Prefecture, where both Japanese graduate students and foreign students majoring in Sustainability Science have committed to relevant activities, such as extracting local needs regarding local resilience from diverse perspectives, continuing dialogues with local stakeholders, and establishing reconstruction knowledge based on people’s feelings and emotions.

In Environmental Energy Community Development that is to be promoted in Shinchi in the coming period, it is essential for us to visit the field directly, in addition to collecting quantitative data, through dialogue with local community, to connect diverse needs that are unique to the local community to seeds of innovative technologies of Smart Community, such as energy use monitoring, etc. Hamadori District including Shinchi in Fukushima Prefecture is a place where the reconstruction from GEJE and its accompanying nuclear disasters shall continue to be promoted in the coming period, and where best solutions are required to changing issues to be solved. In addition, since it is reasonably expected that those solutions would change along with reconstruction advancements, solutions per se are required to be flexible. Facing such quite a contemporary issue as this, it will be a significantly rare opportunity for the educational organization to utilize this focal point of research and Knowledge of universities and research institutes as a learning venue for graduate students.

In this Project, field exercises of Graduate School shall be implemented in Shinchi, which is underpinned by a combination of the abovementioned achievements in education and research of GSFS, Smart Community Project and Energy Demand Actual Measurement System that have been established by and in coordinated with NIES and Shinchi Town, and our achievements in community development in public-private-education partnership through strong coordination between the GSFS and UDC, together with a long-term commitment of GSFS to reconstruction community development that should be continuously implemented. Since the abovementioned existing subjects shall be applied as subjects of exercise classes, the classes could be implemented immediately when it is adopted. In field exercises, relevant participants, including graduate students and foreign students, faculty members, researchers of research institutes, UDC Shinchi’s coordinator, who are engaged in advanced studies in their respective areas of expertise of Environment, Energy, and Community Development, shall plan and implement policies and measures to form settlement environment in collaboration with local residents, on the basis of detailed analyses of demographic trends according to districts and attributes after the disaster, as well as the understanding of people’s needs for their lives through interview surveys from both those who were evacuated from the areas devastated by the nuclear incident and local residents.