Abstract
Densely populated urban cities that comprise a complicated web of people, urban facilities and urban system are highly vulnerable to earthquake disasters. Once an earthquake strikes such a metropolitan city, catastrophic disasters and widespread disaster chain, which may even lead to chaos in the global economy, can be anticipated. This has led to the pressing need for improving the overall earthquake risk reduction technology for urban cities. The Center for Urban Earthquake Engineering has been established to carry out the 21st Century COE program entitled “Evolution of Urban Earthquake Engineering, ” that aims not only to promote the above research objectives but also to strengthen the graduate education program as well as to launch international collaboration in research and education. This paper describes the outline of our COE program on Urban Earthquake.
