The Spatial Dimension of the 11 March Tsunami Disaster

The March 2011 tsunami devastated the coastal areas of Japan's Sanriku region, destroying the world's most sophisticated and 'protective' embankments. This devastation questions the priority that has been given to rigid, high-tech protection in preventing natural disasters, a decision that 1) made possible the urbanization of historically inundation-exposed areas and 2) paradoxically raised the overall vulnerability of those areas' residents to the very events they were built to prevent