Program Outline:

As complex modern social systems interface with the natural world and wider geopolitical order, societies today are paradoxically both increasingly insulated from and exposed to collapse. Climate change is the most existentially serious risk facing humanity, but events like terror attacks, natural disasters, and geopolitical calamity may also reshape politics and society. The coronavirus pandemic illustrates how radically socio-ecological risks may transform the everyday lives of citizens, while the July 2020 torrential rains in Kyushu provided a reminder of a nature’s capacity to overwhelm. Disaster mitigation and societal resilience are becoming increasingly central to political visions today.

Attempts to increase material resilience focus on engineering “disaster-proof” structures, networks, and built environments, while efforts to increase societal resilience, as in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, look to “build back better”, repairing social rifts by reconstructing material landscapes. These strategies focus on institutionalizing particular policies and responses, and are criticized by a series of approaches that instead emphasize the importance of social capital to disaster recovery and post-disaster revitalization. Here, attention is paid to bottom-up, community-based adaptations that occur in response to disasters, offering a corrective to studies that only consider post-disaster reconstruction as the results of institutional efforts (state efforts) to “build” resilience.

However, these approaches all envisage post-disaster recovery in terms of preserving, replacing, or ignoring the material and built environment, and in the process abstract social relations from their material circumstances. This project will consider material structures as social capital; heritage able to be drawn upon in the event of disaster. It will examine the role of this heritage in processes of community recovery, analysing how material environments shape community responses to disasters. Disasters do not only destroy material structures, but rupture community. In post-disaster situations, material structures act as mnemonic repositories through which individuals, localities, and states narrate events. Such structures provide a concrete connection between pre- and post-disaster situations.

The key question for this research project is to understand how material structures function within processes of post-disaster community revitalization. This will be answered by means of a focussed comparative examination into whether and how this process occurs in the aftermath of five specific examples of community rupture, showing the role of material heritage in fostering community repair. The project will undertake a comparative study of these sites in order to analyse how material structures are used to narrate social continuity in the aftermath of ruptures. Providing containers able to stand in for the diverse narratives and memories necessary to enable communities to deal with and overcome such ruptures, buildings and heritage act as sources of authority which enable community recovery.

The project’s core aims are threefold:

·          To document how the built structures shape disaster responses and post-disaster narration.

·          To analyse how the state’s response to damage and degradation of the material landscape affects how the disaster is subsequently narrated and memorialized at more local levels.

·          To examine how community heritage and disaster memorialization function in revitalization.

Five particular examples of community rupture will be examined using the comparative framework developed for the project. The case studies will detail the distinct ways heritage is made to serve as a community resource in response to specific crises. Specifically, these examples of community rupture are war (East Asia), community migration (former Japanese Empire), colonization and decolonization (Taiwan), political collapse (the post-Soviet Kuril Islands), and natural disaster (3.11 disaster in Tohoku). A process analysis of each of these five cases will be used to reveal how material structures become sites of multiple, complex demands and meanings. This will enable the role of built heritage in community disaster recovery to be fully documented and understood.

Field Sites:

coming soon