M. Takahashi's Website
Research Interest

I have specialized in human/social geography, in particular geographical theories of society and space, focusing city and countryside of the contemporary world including Japan and Indonesia. My primary research interests are:

• Changing rural societies and regions,
• Community development in city and countryside,
• Natural disaster and risk governance.

For the first and second topics above, I have conducted some empirical studies focusing on modernization, urbanization and community restructuring in Niigata countryside, Hamamatsu conurbation, Nagasaki region, Furano towns of Hokkaido, Japan, in paticular from the perspectives of interrelationships between community and government as well as the community-based management of public space.

Further I have made some texts about the relationships between regional dynamics and planning policies, being interested in some theoretical and conceptual discussions about contested "ruralities", especially from the perspective of interrelationships between the rural idyll and the political economy: idyllic experiences in repopulated countryside, the commodification of rural space, spatial differentiation and rural mosaic, and food production and consumption.

From the summer of 2005 onward, I've been engaged in integrated researches on the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and tsunami, and the rehabilitation and reconstruction processes. As one of the leading members of Nagoya University's reaserch team, I have conducted field surveys in Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar, Aceh Province, Indonesia from the multi-disciplinary perspective, especially in social aspects, the main themes being spatial differentiation in the post-tsunami village reconstruction process, and the community-based reconstruction and coordination mechanisms.

My research has further extended to issues of disaster in general, in particular the community-based disaster managements in underdeveloped regions focusing on the 2006 Central Java Earthquake and the 2010 Merapi Eruption in Yogyakarta Region, as well as post-disaster recovery and risk management, disaster-prone squatter settlements within the global city, and so on.

From the perspective of multi-layer actors model, more recently, we have launched an inter-national and cross-cultural study about the reconstruction processes and risk managements comparing the recent mega-earthquakes: the 2004 Sumatra Earthquake, the 2008 Suchian Great Earthquake, and the 2011 East Japan Great Earthquake.

The website of the Study Group on "Disaster and Soceity" provides the information of publications, especially related to our researches on the 2004 Sumatra Earthquake.

Copyright © 2015- M. Takahashi. All rights reserved.