SPS seminar with Keisuke Sugano (Waseda University / TU Delft)
18 December 2018
Think Room
Discovering the authenticity of historical city through a collaborative design project
The city center of Tsuruoka-city in Yamagata-Prefecture, located in the Tohoku region of Japan, is an urban area built on the foundation of pre-modern castle town. Since the late 1980s, urban design to inherit the historical landscape and context of the castle town has been promoted. Shigeru Satoh, Professor Emeritus of Waseda University, continues to be involved as an expert from the initial stage of this urban design to the present. I also worked on this activity from 2015 to 2017 as a member of the laboratory presided by Shigeru Satoh.
In the latter half of the 1980 ‘s and the mid 1990’ s, a working group established within the municipality office drew up a future vision for urban design. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, through the process of citizen participation, we formulated and implemented the whole picture and individual projects to promote the development of urban area. From 2015 to 2017, we organized the management strategy of the entire region including the urban area and surrounding rural villages, working in cooperation not only with the public and citizen sector but also private sector. And we examined the regional vision to cope with the decreasing population and aging society.
In the course of collaborative design projects with such various stakeholders, the authenticity of the historical landscape and context of the castle town were discovered by the citizens at each stage. This became vitality to promote urban design, and then, public images were shared. With the process of discovery and sharing as a trigger, we set up a concrete project at each stage. On top of that, organizational structure of various stakeholders including enterprise and platform to implement this was expanded.
In this presentation, this series of flows will be described as a continuous story.
