Adaptive reuse of temporary community facilities in post-disaster recovery: The Kumamoto Home-for-All program

This paper examines how temporary community facilities can instead operate as longer-term recovery assets by analyzing the Kumamoto Home-for-All Reutilization Project in Japan. Focusing on seven completed “Original Type” Home-for-All facilities, the study employs an exploratory, multiple-case qualitative design, drawing on field observations, stakeholder interviews, project documents, and architectural drawings. A cross-case analytical matrix operationalizes three continuity dimensions—physical, functional, and institutional—together with post-reuse modifiers including participation, public access, use intensity, receiving-site context, and memory transmission. 

Findings show three dominant reuse pathways: community-center replacements with high functional continuity and renewed participation through workshops; visitor-oriented public facilities where receiving-site context and interpretation goals redirected the buildings toward broader publics; and an educational facility with high use intensity but weaker explicit disaster-memory programming. Across cases, the findings show that blurring the temporary–permanent boundary depends not on physical preservation alone, but on governance capacity, receiving-site demand, and mechanisms that activate use and meaning over time. The study contributes a trajectory-based framework for evaluating the second life of temporary community infrastructure and offers policy and practice implications for reuse-ready recovery planning.