The goal of disaster recovery is for survivors to regain stability in their lives, livelihoods, and housing. A people-centered housing recovery requires that residents are empowered to make decisions about their housing reconstruction, and that policies create housing options that support the ability of all residents to reconstruct their homes and lives. The 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake caused the largest amount of damage in Japan since World War II, and the subsequent recovery is a starting point for understanding contemporary post-disaster housing reconstruction policies in Japan. Beyond an overview of housing reconstruction programs, we can understand the impact these policies had on Kobe residents' housing and community recovery. In many cases, housing policies implemented after the Kobe earthquake fragmented communities and caused further damage and disruption in the lives of the survivors. A single-track approach failed to support the entire population of the disaster-stricken area. In subsequent years, Japanese disaster reconstruction laws and policies have seen modifications and improvements. Some of these changes can be seen in cases of recovery after more recent disasters, notably after the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake in Niigata Prefecture. In the context of these past examples, we can consider what is needed for a people-centered recovery in the Tohoku area after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

No abstract

Since the end of the 1990s, Hanoi City has instituted a program of urban upgrading. This program aims at improving the living conditions of residents who are living in dilapidated public housing areas (PHAs) which were constructed forty years ago. However, the upgrading implementations are very slow and are challenged by various obstacles, difficulties, and problems. This study is expected to provide opinions to help policy makers in reviewing upgrading mechanisms and policies in connection with upgrading plans and designs. Through findings from interviews with a total of 120 households in the Kim Lien and Giang Vo PHAs, the authors found that: (i) the majority of residents are positive in support of upgrading projects; (ii) most residents want to have resettlement flats at the same location; (iii) most residents prefer to buy flats rather than to rent them when the upgrading project is completed; (iv) a relatively high percentage of residents continue to lack official information about upgrading projects. Discussion on upgrading projects, measures and solutions should be made transparent to the public and related residents should be informed about the process. Successful upgrading projects require a high level of consensus by the residents.

This paper describes the very first effort to examine and verify teleworkers' current physical environment in smaller scales and in broader aspects that have been neglected in existing studies. Through person-to-person and written surveys with Connecticut state government teleworkers, some significances of their physical environment were verified; In smaller scale of municipalities, they live significantly closer to the centers of their towns than national average, while in large scale, they clearly tend to live either in suburbs or in country side than in urban area. After they started telework, their neighborhood reliance in shopping and in service use noticeably increased shrinking the share of down town. Their houses are no larger than the average houses in the area, yet with their household size, majority of them can afford independent offices or large enough space to accommodate dedicated office space. At the same time, formal office, both as a room and as furniture setting, is not always desired. Some of these tendencies also found to correlate with their work-life factors such as telework frequency, their motivation to telework or their new way of time use.

No abstract