Many studies are being conducted on the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake from the earth science and architectural technological aspects, but urban structure is an important intervening factor link-ing causes and damages of an urban earthquake. This note will give a few insights from this point of view.
The distribution of debris of collapsed structure clustered around (1) Suma-Nagata district, (2) Sanno-miya-Yamate district and (3) Nada-Higashinada district was analyzed; (1) and (3) are inner-city areas with many wooden houses, located 3 to 10 km from the central business district.
Some network analyses are further performed usig GIS in the district of cluster (3). The number of arcs within a given road distance shows a characteristic decay caused by the earthquake, but its pat-tern varies by the distance band given. The fractal dimension of road network effectively summa-rizes this information. Calculation of the fractal dimension extracts many points either restricted by transportation facilities or river lines, or enclosed by debris as “dead ends”.
