Charting Disaster Recovery via Google Street View: A Social Science Perspective on Challenges Raised by the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Abstract

There is increasing interest in using Google Street View (GSV) for research purposes, particularly with regard to ''virtually auditing'' the built environment to assess environmental quality. Research in this field to date generally suggests GSV is a reliable means of understanding the ''real world'' environment. But limitations around the dates and resolution of images have been identified. An emerging strand within this literature is also concerned with the potential of GSV to understand recovery post-disaster. Using the GSV data set for the evacuated area around the Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power plant as a case study, this article evaluates GSV as a means of assessing disaster recovery in a dynamic situation with remaining uncertainty and a significant value and emotive dimension. The article suggests that GSV does have value in giving a high-level overview of the postdisaster situation and has potential to track recovery and resettlement over time. Drawing on social science literature relating to Fukushima, and disasters more widely, the article also argues it is imperative for researchers using GSV to reflect carefully on the wider socio-cultural contexts that are often not represented in the photo montage.

Assessing equality in neighbourhood availability of quality greenspace in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

“…There is also a degree of subjectivity in the use of Street View to assess environmental 'quality'. As per previous research (Mabon 2016), factors such as weather, time elapsed since images were taken (meaning that Street View shows the past and not the 'real world' as it is now), and differing time and dates of images between locations can lead to inconsistencies in how the virtual environment is viewed and assessed. The scores applied in our paper are also based on those assigned by one researcher, and could be cross-checked for intercoder reliability by getting a second researcher to code a sub-set of the data.…”

“…The tool used to assess the quality of greenspaces was Google Street View, which has been used elsewhere in greenspace research (e.g. Li et al, 2015;Lu, 2019) and environmental vulnerability research more broadly (Curtis et al 2013;Mabon 2016) as a way of remotely and systematically assessing local environments from 'ground level.' Glasgow was divided into the Data Zones used in SIMD 2016 (see simd.scot and https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/SIMD).…”

Group-Privacy Threats for Geodata in the Humanitarian Context

“…Having an overview of what is exposed is a step that precedes vulnerability quantification while determining the risks. Street-view images have gained importance in auditing the built environment for post-disaster evaluation [28] and recovery [29]. Though the use of CDRs is not common, research notes that it has a high potential for future use in DRRM [30].…”

Vernacular architecture in Brazilian semiarid region: survey and memory in the state of Sergipe

“…In summary, GSV can be a useful tool to replace face-to-face observations of street environment characteristics if classic parts of the survey research project (research time and researcher training) are carefully considered (Nesse & Airt, 2020). Furthermore, Google Street View is being used in studies that aim to verify its feasibility to verify changes caused by environmental disasters, such as hurricanes (Zhai & Peng, 2020), and vulnerability in floods (D'Ayala et al, 2020) as well as accidents with nuclear power plants (Mabon, 2016). In the area of architecture and urbanism, there are studies focused on the detection and analysis of urban art in facades, such as graffiti (Novack et al, 2020), urban landscape analysis (Hong, 2020), and (Kim et al, 2021), among others.…”