Jesse Walker’s latest article at Reason is entitled, Resilient Japan: Three lessons from the week’s disasters. Here’s Walker’s assessment of Japan following natural and human disaster:
An 8.9 earthquake, a 33-foot tsunami, a series of crises at their battered nuclear plants: The people of Japan have withstood the last week with admirable tenacity. There’s no shortage of lessons the rest of the world can learn from what we’ve been seeing. Here are three of them….
Walker offers reasons Japan’s doing as well as she is, under terrible circumstances, and the third of them is the most important:
3. Resilient policies evolve; brittle policies are imposed….
Japan’s rules are far from perfect, but they evolved through experiment and experience, a process that Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella summed up in their 2005 book The Resilient City. Public authorities may try to introduce sweeping new plans after a disaster, they wrote, but “larger urban patterns are not easily or readily altered.”
More often, “particular building codes or practices may change in an effort to limit future vulnerability.” Japanese cities are dense, organic orders whose jumbled layouts are notoriously opaque to outsiders; the country’s citizens have a long history of resisting plans that would substantially reshape the city.
But over the last century they have incrementally altered their codes. Before 1965, skyscrapers were banned altogether, but with advances in engineering the government finally relented and allowed them to appear.