The purpose of this paper is to clarify the spatial knowledge of people through their spatial cognition in the midst of disasters. Under the ‘New Law of Flood Prevention’, amended in 2001, all local governments ought to draw up hazard maps and distribute them to their inhabitants. However, these maps are not the only method for conveying spatial cognition of disasters to the inhabitants.
The author investigated the process of making the hazard maps and changing the contents of sub-textbooks for social studies in the primary schools in Ogaki City, Gifu Prefecture, where inhabitants have suffered from frequent flood disasters. Moreover, the author conducted two different kinds of fieldwork, one in which the inhabitants were asked to draw their own hand maps to investigate their spatial recognition of the disasters, and the other in which inhabitants were interviewed about floods.
Contents of sub-textbooks for social studies include the local industries, characteristics of the region and the local history of disasters as well. 40 years ago, the damage and the reasons for the floods, and the flood control work appeared in the sub-textbooks, but recently meritorious men who contributed to flood control are stressed in these books. These changes are based on the decrease of floods through strengthening the banks, and the revision of the educational guidelines by the national government.
Few Ogaki inhabitant groups discussed the hazard maps together with the experts on disasters. The inhabitants only commented on the design of the hazard maps. However, in the Arasaki district, inhabitants themselves have their own experiential cognition of disasters. In research of the hand drawn maps, various spatial cognition of disaster can be identified even among the inhabitants living within only 1 km2 owing to the height of the ground and the existence of the strong banks around their houses. In the context of the spatial cognition of disasters, it is important to consider the ‘structuration theory’ proposed by Anthony Giddens. Especially the process of ‘disembedding and re-embedding’ will be vital for this paper.
The cognition of disaster has been changed by the repeated experiences of floods and changes in the local society. Hazard maps are generally not experiential knowledge but represent expert knowledge drawn for the purpose of planning evacuation from the floods. They are not maps for defending the territory.
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