Urban Planner André Sorensen Discusses Rebuilding Challenges in Japan

Part of the reason that professor André Sorensen, an urban geographer at the University of Toronto, chose Japanese city planning in the early 1990s as his academic niche is that the topic had barely been explored at the time, at least in English. “Japan was the second largest economy in the world, and there was almost nothing written about it,” says Sorensen, whose Ph.D. focused on Tokyo’s problematic sprawl and whose books have included 2004’s The Making of Urban Japan

Sorensen’s research and subsequent teaching assignments also had him living in Japan from 1994 to 2002, which means he was in the country to witness the devastation caused by the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck the city of Kobe in 1995.

But if his area of study once seemed fairly obscure, it has suddenly taken on new relevance. That’s because of the double blow of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and 30-foot tsunami that leveled the Pacific coast around the city of Sendai on March 11, killing more than 10,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

During the Industrial Revolution, Japan was slow to build modern infrastructure. Its cities didn’t really use sewers until the 1950s; instead, they carted away human waste to use as fertilizer. But, Sorensen says, construction methods in the years since have been fairly state-of-the-art, so much so that there may not be many new building techniques left to experiment with, to keep the country safe in the future.

Instead, Japan might be better off relocating cities to higher ground. During a recent interview, Sorensen shared his thoughts on that approach and what else the expected five-year, $180 billion rebuilding effort should entail.

CH: What lessons can we take away from how the buildings and infrastructure fared?