Abstract
To cope with many and simultaneous fires in a wooden city caused by a great earthquake, there are three major strategies which are a) Prevention of fire outbreak, b) Interception of fire spreading, c) Evacuation of inhabitants. In the Japanese metropolitan area of today, evacuation to a safe open space of refuge is the only way to secure the life safety of inhabitants even though they had to walk long distance to get there. But not only for securing the life safety but also for the reduction of material damage, it is desired that fiveshould be suppressed in its earlystage by the trategies of a) and b). And it could be said that the ultimate goal of disaster prevention planning is to reconstruct a city structurally strong in conflagration and make the evacuation planning unnecessary. As a step for attaining this object, a methodology is proposed which at first finds out districts that have no safe open space of refuge within walking distance and then divides them into small blocks that are surrounded with firebreaks and evacuates the inhabitants to the blocks that come to have no fire spreadings there. Seen from the measures to allocate a park of refuge in each block and secure enough open space between wooden houses, the planning for preventing post-earthquake fire damage is no more than the planning for providing comfortable living environment in a city.
