Masahiro Sawada

In recent years, while floods and landslides have become more frequent due to climate change and urbanization, regional vulnerability has increased due to population decline and aging. Against this backdrop, the importance of “disaster-resilient community development”—which comprehensively improves living environments from a disaster prevention perspective—has grown.This paper aims to propose scenarios for creating safe and secure urban spaces by examining Kitakyushu City, which integrates disaster prevention with urban restructuring, through literature review and interview research. The findings suggest that district disaster prevention plans should be positioned as a process for accumulating local risk awareness. By gradually connecting this process to land use conversion through urban planning, safe and secure urban spaces can be created.

This survey report investigates the gap between disaster prevention weather information and residents’ evacuation behavior during the August 2014 Hiroshima Heavy Rain Disaster. Although meteorological forecasting technology has improved, it does not always lead to effective resident action. To understand this discrepancy, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five residents in the affected Asaminami Ward and analyzed 88 narratives from published experience records. We mapped residents’ subjective “moments of anxiety” and “evacuation decisions” against objective meteorological data (precipitation and warnings). The survey results reveal that residents’ sense of crisis often lagged significantly behind the issuance of warnings and was instead triggered by direct sensory perceptions of danger (e.g., sounds of rain and debris flow). This report provides qualitative data highlighting the specific cognitive barriers to using weather information in rapid-onset disasters.