Totsuka Pre-Disaster Planning Collective, Shinjuku, Tokyo
Pre-Disaster Planning Education, Shinjuku Totsuka is a result of decade-long, community-led effort that treats disaster preparedness as part of everyday place-making in a dense Tokyo neighborhood. The Totsuka Community-Based Collaborative Recovery Activity Research Group (TCCRG)—a coalition of residents, neighborhood associations, practitioners, educators, and researchers—has revived and updated a pre-disaster recovery vision first developed in 2010–2013, responding to changing demographics, redevelopment, and rising earthquake and flood risks along the Kanda River.
The program treats risk communication as a co-production. From 2021 to 2023, TCCRG ran hybrid seminars, hands-on mapping workshops, and public outreach to align official guidance with real-world conditions and to surface barriers for seniors, people with disabilities, caregivers with strollers, and schoolchildren. Its key tool is Nige Chizu (“evacuation map”), a participatory method that color-codes walking time to safety and prompts people to flag obstacles, alternative routes, support needs, and safe destinations. This simple, visual process levels participation, sparks dialogue across ages and languages, and produces concrete route and facility adjustments.
Education is built in. With a local public elementary school, fourth-graders made their own Nige Chizu for everyday routes (home–school–park), linking lessons to real streets, river edges, and shelters. Family-friendly outreach—especially a “Halloween Disaster Mitigation Walk”—brought many first-time participants into preparedness through playful, place-based learning. A free “Halloween Walk Manual” now helps other communities and schools replicate the idea.
The work has measurable results. Residents proposed shifting or adding safe destinations—moving away from over-congested commercial corridors to more viable arterials and adding closer, higher-elevation sites like care facilities—cutting modeled evacuation times by about 6–18 minutes in many areas. They also identified practical strategies, such as using flat riverside paths when early flood warnings allow and adding resting spots for seniors, linking emergency and everyday mobility. These findings have been shared with Shinjuku Ward and are informing evacuation policy updates.
TCCRG shows how pre-disaster planning can stay current through light-touch, repeatable activities that build local knowledge and translate it into spatial change and policy dialogue. Methods and materials—base-map preparation, step-by-step workshop protocols, streaming/archiving, and child-friendly outreach tools—are documented for easy adoption by other communities and school systems. Our educational programs have now expanded to other Tokyo districts, including Suginami and Taitō.