A Review of “Vulnerable India: A Geographical Study of Disasters”

Community improvements in their postearthquake incarnations. The heart of this fascinating book is an excursion through the variety of redevelopment experiences in the twenty-four Intensive Restoration Zones that were targeted in Kobe’s reconstruction and then a detailed look at the remaking of three specific neighborhoods that Edgington selected as special case studies. Reconstructing Kobe is both broad-ranging and rich in specific detail. Despite the somewhat technical material, it is a fun read because it is extremely well written, well organized, and very attractively presented. By design, the book does not delve into the psychological trauma that the earthquake caused, which would have been an enormous undertaking on its own, but focuses instead on the also ample and compelling topic of physical damage to housing, commercial districts, and urban infrastructure and their repair. Three very thoughtful appendices provide specific details without interfering with the book’s readability or the flow of major arguments: a chronology of events relating to the earthquake, an inventory of relief and recovery measures enacted by the national government in response to the disaster, and a list of actions undertaken by local government to enable reconstruction. There are plenty of illustrations, many of them Edgington’s own photographs, and they are excellent. All in all, this book is a very fine account of a tragic episode and the mixed record of ameliorative measures that followed, as well as a wake-up call that Japan’s construction engineering is not as safe from earthquakes as was once assumed and that city planning and development in the country is habitually fixed on economic growth projects to the detriment of neighborhoods and their people.