Social Link as Cultural Landscape Heritage. The Prerequisite of Social Capital Management to any Built Environment

Abstract :
For decades, scientific research and planning expertise work mutually to confront environmental issues with the complex prospective in social sciences, ensuring the foundation of the current "Cultural Landscape" studies. In parallel, with the advent of sustainable development the excesses of Green and Social Washing appeared, perverting the Landscape Planning towards a dangerous trend of instrumentalization of social capital with the hidden intent to ensure the profitability of a Shallow Ecology.

To counteract this emerging Green Capitalism in addition to the environmental and social disturbance produced by the Territorial Planning since the second half of the twentieth century, a practice amongst developers ecologically more responsible in the so-called Social Engineering emerges. Planners and researchers are now using a revitalization and resilience of human communities to consider the future of any built environment.

It is the transition to this new environmental sociology in Japan that this study will seek to enlighten : Exploring what led to the reformulation of the role of the planners in a more social and ecological angle, from the rise of the Machizukuri phenomenon to projects implemented by the planner Hideki Koizumi.

This study addresses the social ecology mechanism implemented in a country faced with dramatic environmental issues : how developers respond today by seizing newly the social link as fundamental landscape heritage to set up sustainable communities. We try to understand how the planning of social link in emergency state after the 2011 Earthquake validates these new environmental philosophies.

Keywork : Social Engineering, Social Ecology, Japan, Cross-Cultural Landscape, Comprehensive Planning, Social Sustainability, Environmental Mediation, Hideki Koizumi