Damage Analysis of the Great East Japan Earthquake

This paper tries to comprehensively summarize the reasons of damages at the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 and what are the lessons in terms of earthquake and tsunami safety of building and cities. The paper examines the damage of tsunami affected areas and analyses the damage to extract lessons in order to safely reconstruct the affected areas from the view point of building regulations such as ＂Disaster Risk Area＂ provided by the Article 39 of the Building Standard Law and the Urbanization Control Area and UPA （Urbanization Promotion Area） provided by the Article 8 of the Ordinance of the City Planning Law of Japan.

Policy Analysis on Building Regulations and the Recovery of Earthquake and Tsunami Affected Areas

The paper examines the situation and causes of recent big earthquake and tsunami disasters especially in the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and analyzes the damage to extract lessons on safety of buildings and recovery of cities from the view point of building regulations such as the Article 39 of the Building Standard Law. In addition, the Article 8 of the Ordinance of City Planning Law resulted in not so effective against tsunami in March 2011. Control mechanisms of building construction should be integrated into socio-economic, institutional, technical and other policy tools. In order to mitigate earthquake risk, all stages of building construction, from location, planning and construction to maintenance are important. Awareness creation is instrumental for building culture of safety and demands for intervention in disaster mitigation. The demands ultimately help in creating conducive environment for policy intervention, in realizing institutional mechanism of building code enforcement and land use control for the municipal authorities and in creating demand for competent professionals.

From Sequential to Parallel Growth of Cities： Theory and Evidence from Canada

This paper examines city growth patterns and the corresponding city size distribution evolution over long periods of time using a simple New Economic Geography(NEG) model and urban population data from Canada. The main findings are twofold. First, there is a transition from sequential to parallel growth of cities over long periods of time: city growth shows a sequential mode in the stage of rapid urbanization, i.e., the cities with the best development conditions will take the lead in growth, after which the cities with higher ranks will become the fastest-growing cities; in the late stage of urbanization, city growth converges according to Gibrat′s law, and exhibits a parallel growth pattern. Second, city size distribution is found to have persistent structural characteristics: the city system is self-organized into multiple discrete size groups; city growth shows club convergence characteristics, and the cities with similar development conditions eventually converge to a similar size. The results will not only enhance our understanding of urbanization process, but will also provide a timely and clear policy reference for promoting the healthy urbanization of developing countries.