Abstract
Many cultural heritage sites exist in the historic city of Kyoto. Wooden buildings account for a majority of these sites, and they exist in a large proportion in the surrounding urban areas. Therefore, protecting Kyoto′s cultural properties from fire hazards is a pressing issue in urban planning. Based on this type of problem awareness, this study aims to produce basic documentation related to future disaster-prevention measures for cultural properties.
First, we conducted a field survey of the buildings surrounding cultural properties and compiled critical distance of fire spreading dilated volume fraction (DVF) buffer data for each structure. We calculated the critical distance of fire spreading taking into account the weather conditions of wind speed and direction, and illustrated the DVF buffer using image processing techniques and created a fire spreading graph. We then analyzed the risk of fire spreading to cultural properties from both the macro and micro perspectives according to the number of configuration nodes for the DVF buffer and graph.
We found that the majority of cultural properties at high risk of fire spreading are folk dwellings and Japanese traditional town houses and that many are distributed in areas of high-density wood construction.
