Government acquisition of residential land has played a growing role in the reconstruction of housing in safer places and reduction of water‐related risks. This paper explores how the rationales and processes of residential buyouts may result in different consequences for coastal recovery, mitigation, and residents' wellbeing referring to government documents and existing literature, we explored the characteristics of buyout programs in Japan and the U.S., identified consequences of mitigation and recovery, and deduced the effects of community buyouts. Our study revealed buyout programs could reduce risk exposure, enhance sustainable and resilient coastal rewilding, housing recovery, and building of community resilience. However, they could also contribute to limiting homeowners' opportunities to make their own choices to stay or relocate, the distribution of residents into unfamiliar communities, creation of checkerboard patterns of acquired properties, and un‐utilized vast vacant lands. These results suggest that planners and disaster managers need careful consideration to redesign and manage property acquisition programs that not only increase regional resilience, but also are equitable for affected residents and utilization of acquired lands.

This study clarified the process of land use transformation and post-disaster placemaking in the disaster hazardous zones and the factors that contribute to placemaking. In the Arahama area of Sendai City, where the case study was conducted, we found that diverse stakeholders gave new meaning to the former residential area and involved the surrounding community through various activities and innovations, resulting in the revitalization of the area as a "place. The study pointed out that former residential areas can be revitalized as new "places" not only through the process of conventional reconstruction planning but also through the process in which each party creates a "place" and the area is composed of a bundle of meanings added by various entities.

This paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey, regarding changes in people's places and residence, conducted in Rikuzentakata City, Iwate Prefecture and Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, where the Tsunami Reconstruction Memorial Park was constructed. We identified places of residence, names of living areas and specific people's places by the data obtained from the questionnaire survey and visualize the spatial transformation through geocoding. We revealed that the Tsunami Reconstruction Memorial Park, which was embedded with the meaning of passing on disaster legacies and memories, used to be a place of residence for residents, a source of pride for the community, is no longer a place for people. Local government must support the proactive activities of citizens to regenerate and create a place, and to revitalize the Reconstruction Memorial Park, which covers a large area of the city, as an important place for the city and a place for people.

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Gathering and public spaces, along with infrastructure and houses, are demolished because of disasters, which weakens the community ties. Different approaches, such as government-led and community-driven, to recovery initiate the recovery of gatherings and public spaces, and the long-term impact of each recovery approach on community recovery may not be overseen. This study attempts to determine incorporation of community participation in different recovery approaches and its corresponding result in the production of gathering spaces, based on two main background theories: Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation and Henri Lefebvre’s production of space triad. We attempted to determine the results by reviewing case studies with different recovery processes after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami-2011 and through interviews and questionnaire surveys. The results showed that the production of gathering spaces may be associated with the recovery scenario in each case study. In community-driven cases, the main gathering spaces are small open spaces, evenly superimposed and accessible, and diverse in spatial configuration, provide services for the users at a good level, and are in a sync with other gathering spaces. By contrast, in government-led cases, gathering spaces contain primary and secondary spaces that lack connections with each other. These main gathering spaces are centralized near disaster public housing sites, are highly accessible to disaster public housing residents, provide a high range of leisure-based activities, and provide services to users from inside and outside of the communities. These main gathering spaces are extended by inclusive open space (Hiroba) and this spatial planning is closer to the concept of public spaces compared to others.