Planning

ABSTRACT: In Japan, it is important to carry out urban planning considering natural disasters, because earthquakes occur frequently. However, except for few cases, cities in Japan have not been designed with any definite visions for urban safety based on previous research concerning natural disasters. It is necessary for the people in Japan to propose a future vision of a city from the urban safety point of view, as it has been plagued with many earthquakes throughout history. On the other hand, recent information technology enabled the improvement of real-time monitoring systems after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and the 1995 Kobe Earthquake. The authors proposed a method of analyzing and designing a city based on the urban safety point of view in previous papers. This method, named as MUSE (the Method of Urban Safety Analysis and Environmental Design), is based on the theory of The Image of the City by Lynch (1961), and some urban physical elements are defined as parts of an organic system. In this paper the prospect for MUSE and the methodology to realize it are described. The proposed system is related to Information Technologies and we expect that MUSE will be applied to early earthquake damage assessment systems. 1