As urbanization is a global phenomenon, cities and urban areas all over the world witness rapid population growth. According to 2011 World Urbanization Prospects (Department of the Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division of United Nations, 2012), 52.1% of the entire world population reside in cities. Rapid growth of urban areas has caused a wide range of urban problems such as shortage of affordable housing, traffic congestion, and environmental degradation. The human habits concentrated in urban areas have also been vulnerable to natural and man-made disasters and hazards which have constantly destroyed and threatened citizens’ lives and private properties. A safer living environment is a critical issue for any urban area to address to create a prosperous and sustainable human habitat.

抄録全体を表示

This study attempts to develop a method to evaluate the difficulty of emergency response activities in densely built-up areas, focusing on practical usefulness and issues in local cities of Japan. The emergency response activities are classified into evacuation, firefighting, and rescue, based on previous research. The method evaluates the difficulty of the activities by calculating the non-arrival probability and arrival distance for each building, using physical condition data. The developed method is applied to case study districts in Japanese local cities that have disaster mitigation issues. From spatial and quantitative analysis using evaluation results of the emergency response activities, we found that the difficulty of the activities in local cities is relatively low compared with results obtained in previous research dealing with densely built-up areas in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. Finally, we discuss the possibility of the proposed method as a support tool for community-based planning for disaster mitigation that can plainly offer residents useful information about the difficulty of the response activities.

抄録全体を表示

Concurrently with the advance of urbanization, many urban problems have increased in our everyday life. It is said that there has been a decrease in the number of crimes committed in Japan, but the number of urban crimes is, on the contrary, increasing. Accordingly, crime prevention has been one of the biggest issues in city planning. A number of arguments about CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design) or other crime preventive methods have been already carried out. While most papers show the relationship between macroscopic geographical aspects and the occurrence of a specific crime, the impact of more microscopic objects and/or spatial design in the crime site as the spatial vulnerability against a crime has not been clarified. Moreover, there is a clear need to find resilience, in other words the difficulty to commit a crime. Therefore, this paper’s purpose is to reveal the vulnerability and resilience against one specific crime, arson, in Fukuoka and more specifically in Haruyoshi district, through consecutive researches from urban planning and environmental psychological viewpoints. As a result, we found that there are temporal and spatial vulnerabilities against arson in Fukuoka and Haruyoshi which remain to be improved intensively. However, at the same time, Haruyoshi has some resilience against arson, and we conclude that the human traffic, observability and inanonymity are high in the district. Consequently, at the end of this paper, based on the knowledge about both vulnerability and resilience of the district, specific suggestions are proposed on the way to install CPTED in Haruyoshi against arson.

抄録全体を表示

For urban areas with complicated functions and facing rapidly increasing exposure to disaster risks, reducing vulnerability is the most effective way to alleviate damages and losses, which requires first and foremost precise assessment of the social and economic system’s vulnerability. Considering the strong variations of social and economic factors by location and convenience for emergency management, it is very important to take small blocks as the basic spatial unit for vulnerability assessment. However, thus far appropriate evaluation method at such scale is quite inadequate in terms of theoretical framework, data acquisition method and analytical model. Taking Haidian district in Beijing as an example, a set of models was developed to solve these problems. Day and night population estimation model, population vulnerability assessment model, economic scale model, and economic vulnerability assessment model were designed to assess the population and economic vulnerability of urban areas. Results of the case study in Beijing demonstrated the population and economic vulnerability of each block in the study area, and suggested a difference between daytime and night time. The hotpots of high vulnerability were also identified and the land use characteristics and function agglomeration of these areas were discussed. Clearly, these results provided an important base for making effective disaster prevention plan and emergency management.

抄録全体を表示

This study is to suggest a new methodology of crime risk assessment and application method. The current crime risk assessment method is to infer the possibility of crime occurrence by analyzing the past crime data. But there are many limitations and problems to depend on the analysis with past data. Considering these problems, this study proposes the new methodology to assess crime risk integrated with the existing methods and various factors based on the CPTED principle. This methodology is named as 'Multi-Layered Risk Assessment (MLRA)' because it uses the various factors layered using GIS. The results of MLRA represent a visual graphic for easy interpretation after grading the crime risk. The characteristics of MLRA are able to grade the crime risk on the street and intersection and to be applied in CCTV positioning.

抄録全体を表示