Restructuring city blocks has become very important especially in central commercial zones in Tokyo. In planning city centers, the predictability of building development in a city block is crucial. In this study, we challenge this problem classifying city blocks by influential factors of location of building coverage in a city block, and then examining the predictability of building coverage in each class. The probability of building coverage for each point in a block is visualized to grasp the spatial image. With the analyses of 205 city blocks in commercial zones in Tokyo, influential factors are identified, such as presence of an adjacent wide road and its direction, northsouth length of city block, and uniformity of building use in a city block.

The purpose of study is to measure accessibility to evacuate from tsunami quantitatively on the basis of geographical conditions such as coastal geometry, location of mid-to-high-rise buildings, road network, population distribution, and so on. We measured road distance from measurement points as “Geo-Evacuatability index” with spacing of approximately 50 meters to higher places or buildings than an estimated height of tsunami in coastal area in Tokushima Prefecture. An accessibility is low in most of low-lying coastal land in peripheral suburban area because higher elevation places and mid-to-high-rise buildings are not much existing. On the other hand, an accessibility is relatively high in the area with ria coast where an estimated height of tsunami is critically high. Since most of the area is relatively high in elevation in low-lying coastal land, it is accessible for residents to higher places than estimated height of tsunami. The result shows that situation is more critical in the low-lying coastal land of peripheral suburbs than that of the ria coastal area.

Sun glare may be a major hazard for car drivers in the winter. This is because the sun is low in the sky during the morning and evening where the roads are at their busiest with people driving to work and to home. The purpose of this article is to analyze what to extend the sun glare disability arises in rectangular area. We derive the probability of sun glare by use of computing the number of trips driving toward the sun. In addition, we examine how the shape, the direction, the latitude of the rectangular study area affect such probability.

After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, delay of the community planning caused by the insufficiency of information sharing and consensus building in the community had become a bottleneck of reconstruction. In this research, we examined how to utilize the information system for such problem, and developed a map-based application to support solving the problem. The application has a function that illustrates how the facilities in the area would reconstruct according to its time using interactive maps and icons. In this regard, we got a good reputation: the feature makes it easy to share the concrete image of the reconstruction plan. In addition, regarding the function that supports consensus building, it was able to summarize the opinions of the residents effectively, and through the problem that emerged when we simulated its operation with local governments, we realized the necessity to consider from the standpoint of all people concerned with the community planning.

One of the most highlighted benefits of using GIS in the field of disaster risk reduction is to visualize the disaster-related information. It helps citizens to understand the post-disaster situation, disaster prone areas, and so forth for better decision making and countermeasure actions. However, GIS has not been utilized yet to visualize efficiency of disaster warning dissemination. We therefore, conducted an experiment to issue warning messages through various media, such as loudspeakers and SMS, at rural mountainous areas in Thailand, and visualized the warning messages distribution. As a result, it was clarified that although the media has both positive and negative characteristics, the each medium works as complementary manner to another for efficient warning. The result was presented visually as maps so that they would contribute for further discussion of warning dissemination strategy and for heightening of citizens’ disaster awareness.