Rural futures – the transition towards a circular society based on the harmonious coexistence of nature and humans: the case of RE:STORE in Satsumasendai City

In the past decade, there has been a paradigm shift in promoting a more sustainable economy and society on a global scale. However, those policies are often designed for large cities like Tokyo and do not consider the context of rural areas. This paper describes the collaborative spearheading of a circular design lab, RE:STORE. The space was formerly a traditional rice shop that had been abandoned for the last decade in Satsumasendai City - a rural site in Kyushu. The renovation project was led by Re:public, a social innovation design firm based in the region that soured bottom-up interventions and most importantly, placed local reisdents and its natural environment in the center of the transition towards circular society. Satsumasendai’s industry is currently dependent on its nuclear power plants, but due to a new government- mandated rule, the power plant may close down in the next 20years. With such an emergent future of potentially losing one of its main sources of the city's industry, RE:STORE was born as a hub for the residents to learn, prototype, and explore new local economies and lifestyles by re-learning the relationship between humans and the natural environment. This paper describes how local residents were involved in the co-designing process of RE:STORE on both conceptual and practical levels. The project also adds to a greater discourse on how grassroots, bottom-up initiatives that prototype a lifestyle that is rooted in the harmonious coexistence of nature and humans