Disaster Management and City Planning: Lessons of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake

This book first provides a comprehensive guideline for future disaster-resistant city planning in large cities in disaster-prone countries such as Japan. It is a compilation of knowledge and know-how obtained through the author's work in the national government for one and half years in the Earthquake Reconstruction Headquarters, right after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake on 17 January 1995. The author has carefully examined the various ad hoc measures taken just after the earthquake, which were criticized because they did not work as well as expected. Additionally, he has examined the later revisions in disaster and risk management systems made at the levels of local and national governments through experience in the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, to which the author had long been committed.

The author argues that the rescue activities, rehabilitation, and reconstruction plans for disaster countermeasures implemented once a disaster has occurred and the city planning established in ordinary times should be extremely tightly connected with each other. City planning that subsumes rescue activities, rehabilitation, and reconstruction plans against what ought to have happened would critically improve the capability of crisis management and, consequently, protect life and property once a disaster has occurred. Such city planning eventually creates disaster-resistant cities.

This book assumes readers to be graduate students who study city planning. It is also beneficial for practitioners and policy makers who are in charge of the construction of disaster-resistant cities at the national and local levels of governments, especially in disaster-prone countries.