JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles exhibit Designing with Disaster | Stories from Seven Regenerative Cities — on display Jan. 27 – April 2 — introduces the concept of “Regenerative Urbanism,” anticipatory urban design that embraces inevitable disasters and creates disaster-resilient environments.
The exhibition explores the optimistic possibility of symbioses between humans and the natural and constructed worlds, embracing inevitable disasters and creating disaster-resilient environments. The exhibition also features illuminated Regenerative City Wells (“Wells”) with an immersive physical, video, and audio experience envisioning seven hypothetical regenerative cities.
Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction was held in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture, the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicenter in the Tohoku region. As a result, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 outlined targets and priorities to prevent new disasters, while reducing existing disaster risks worldwide. Inspired by this framework, UCLA xLAB (University of California, Los Angeles) and Tohoku University’s IRIDeS (International Research Institute of Disaster Science) collaborated with 11 Pacific Rim universities on a new initiative named ArcDR3 (Architecture and Urban Design for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience). Design studios linked to research at each university have been exploring ways to respond to disasters and build new disaster-resilient environments around the world. The Designing with Disaster exhibition presents exciting proposals for Seven Regenerative Cities inspired by that exploration.
