Clinical Rural Planning Approach to Recovery from the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake

This paper reports the application of a “Clinical Rural Planning (CRP)” approach in the Najimi District of Wajima City, Ishikawa Prefecture, which suffered extensive damage in the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake (NE2024). The Najimi District comprises 11 hamlets, including Shiroyone Senmaida, a terraced rice field recognized as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System. The earthquake devastated homes, farmland, and essential community infrastructure. During the recovery, a gap emerged between government-led plans that prioritized urban-centered reconstruction and the strong desire of residents to remain in their home communities. In response, the authors employed insights from rural planning and clinical sociology to attentively listen to the thoughts and needs of the affected residents and assist in articulating their recovery priorities. Through local workshops and structured dialogues with government officials, they helped build a process that conveyed the voices of residents to administrative bodies. In this approach, researchers did not act as conventional investigators but as partners—emphasizing trust-building and empathetic dialogue. The CRP was operationalized through informal group dialogues and hamlet-level participatory workshops that produced written request lists that were subsequently used to structure a public meeting with the Mayor. The process demonstrated the effectiveness of CRP in converting situated community needs into actionable administrative agendas while maintaining ethical engagement and avoiding research fatigue.