2001 Volume 53 Issue 1 Pages 34-44
Land use control is one of the most powerful planning tools for hazard mitigation, which includes the building code of use and structure, affording incentives for relocation or quakeproofing, disclosure of information and so on. We have already carried out a questionnaire survey of inhabitants in Sendai to examine the social acceptability of these kinds of regulations. Serialized questionnaire survey was conducted at the end of 1999 targeting at the disaster prevention and urban planning section's staffs of local government. This article deals with the feasibility of land use control along active faults according to the questionnaire survey.
The following conclusions are obtained. First, citizens are likely to show more acceptable and positive attitude toward the implementation of the regulation in general than administrative staffs. Second, among government sections, the staffs of urban planning are more passive or negative against the regulation than that of disaster prevention. Furthermore, the passiveness of planning staffs may also deviate from citizen's views. In case of the administrative staffs as well as citizens, especially of urban planning, the acquisition of disaster information tends to improve the rate of support to the regulation. Third, with regard to facilities handling dangerous materials, public facilities, customer attracting complexes, and apartment houses, more than the half of citizens and administrative staffs insist that facilities listed above should not be located on the active faults. Lastly, conspicuous opinions are observed among the staffs of local governments having the active faults that require scientific investigation in detail. They are negative about the adoption of severe land use control, but are active in forcing to investigate the active fault in large-scale development sites.
In Japan, the disclosure of information on disaster, such as the publication of various hazard maps, is greatly advancing now. There already exist some tools with legal basis, but few of them are adopted in practice. Land use control is one of the most important prior-measures for disaster prevention in a long range, and should have been widely utilized. It is necessary to revise system to strengthen the collaboration and personnel inter-exchanges between two sections, and to prepare planning and regulation menus with variety and flexibility. Offering disaster information to the urban planning section is helpful to promote efficiency in planning effort for hazard mitigation.
