The Role of Parks in the Inheritance of Regional Memories of Disasters

Abstract

The inheritance of disaster memory is considered an important issue. Disaster prevention is one of the main functions of urban parks, and every time a catastrophe occurs, disaster prevention functions have been improved. For disaster prevention, in addition to ‘public assistance’ such as maintenance of facilities and systems (hardware) by the administration, ‘self-help’ and ‘co-aid’ by each citizen are indispensable. Besides the infrastructure or hardware aspect, urban parks become places to convey memories of disasters and potential contributors to ‘software’ such as raising the consciousness level of disaster prevention and improving the ability to prevent local disasters. In this research, I focus on the inheritance of local memories in order to enhance the disaster prevention function of urban parks. After reviewing past researches, I examined the evidence of memories of disasters in parks in Naka Ward, Yokohama City. As a result of my study, I discovered that there are some monuments mentioning earthquake disasters in the inscriptions, although communicating memories of disasters is not the main purpose of the monuments. There are some monuments that are memorials to war damage and accidents. I consider parks’ function of inheriting memories of disasters as still insufficient. It is necessary to clarify the purpose of inheritance, the subject of inheritance, and the measures taken to nurture inheritance of disaster memories in order to make better use of parks to improve the ability of the area to prevent disasters.