ABSTRACT
To help recreate social bonds and recover affected communities, scholars have recommended the provision of gathering spaces in recovery planning processes. Spatial justice in the context of gathering spaces refers to ensuring equal access and sharing of benefits among their users. This chapter identifies multiple criteria of spatial justice in post-disaster recovery of gathering spaces in six communities affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. It investigates how the degree of community involvement could change the way residents gain post-disaster spatial justice through recovered gathering spaces. An evaluation model generated from relevant theory is used to measure the levels of just recovery in these places. As the main places for social interactions, gathering spaces can either mitigate or exacerbate segregation and/or injustice in the recovery of communities from disaster. Disaster-affected populations benefit from resident-centered gathering spaces that embody distributive, procedural, and interactional justice, leading in turn to empowerment of the community. In the processes of recovering gathering spaces after 3.11, different levels of resident empowerment were observed; only cases with maximum community involvement met the three criteria of procedural, distributive, and interactional post-disaster spatial justice.
