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Kobayashi and Associates,
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RESOURCE §
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What
Can Seattle Learn From Kobe Junko Anazawa Koichi
Kobayashi Introduction Five years have passed since the major earthquake struck the Hanshin-Awaji
area of Japan. Since then, the world has seen the people's endeavor to
recover from the disaster and to rebuild their cities and their
neighborhoods. For us, who live and work in Seattle, the lesson of the
earthquake thousands miles away cannot be ignored. Being a sister city to
Kobe, Seattle shares with her the geography of sitting on the land where a
massive ground shake can take place. Just like Kobe, Seattle is a major
international port city with modern and densely populated industrial and
commercial areas; Seattle possess all aspects of a city that Kobe had and
lost in the disaster. Kobe proved how vulnerable a city can be against the power of
nature. But she also gave us valuable lessons during her course of recovery
and reconstruction efforts, in how to build a strong and sustainable city
against major disasters. Now is the time for Seattle people to revisit the
experience of Hanshin earthquake and re-examine our city as to how well we
are prepared and what we should do now to make the city strong against
disasters. Are we prepared? First, I would like to take a close look at Seattle’s
preparedness. There are three major points to be addressed. The City of Seattle has an office called Division of Emergency
Management, which specifically focus on emergency safety issues. They provide
guidelines for citizens on how to respond in major disaster situations and
how to secure their safety. They have also formulated "Coordinated
Response Plan", in which the city, along with police and fire, work from
a centralized headquarter to provide rescue and support to citizens
throughout the city. In the presense of the city’s effort, it is still questionable
how effective and sufficient the centralized rescue measures would be. The
Hanshin earthquake has clearly proved that mutual cooperation within a
neighborhood is more important than the govenmental effort in an emergency
situation. Therefore, the City of Seattle is trying to promote SDART (Seattle
Disaster Aid & Response Teams), which is a neighborhood-oriented approach
to emergency preparedness. The City supports neighborhoods to form SDART
groups (which usually consist of 25-50 households), and assists each group’s
practice ib building its skill of mutual help. Right now about 270 SDART
groups exist in Seattle, but it covers only about 1% of the total population.
Another seismic hazard consideration within the city is in
regulations in land development and building permit process. The City sets
standards for the strength and stability of building structures by using the
Universal Building Code. When it comes to site planning at large, the city
has "Environmentally Critical Areas", which specify the areas where
development needs to be regulated for protecting critical areas for city’s
environment. For seismic hazard related items, landslide prone areas and
liquefaction prone areas are mapped out. What are the problems? What do we need now? Now, we ask ourselves a question "Is our city prepared
enough?" The answer will be "no". Comparing to the level of emergency safety measures that Kobe
or other cities of Japan are trying to achieve, Seattle is still under
developed. What then are our problems and what should we do now? One major factor of Seattle’s ill preparedness is citizens'
lack of awareness to seismic hazards, the citizens don’t have any recent
memory of major earthquakes in the Puget Sound Area. There is a striking
contrast between Seattle citizens and the people in major cities of Japan,
where earthquakes have always been threats, and people are forced to prepare
themselves to protect their lives from possible destruction. In Seattle,
geographers and seismologists have been studying the likeliness of
earthquakes in this region and the danger of it. Graphically portraying these
studies and making them accessible to the citizens will be effective tool to
increasing the awareness of the people so that they can build mental
checklists of preparedness. Aside from the public awareness issue, problems can be
addressed in the city’s disaster management plan, which is designed to be
very centralized and which depend heavily on the government police and fire
departments. It important that the city has overall schemes and it is they
which will play an integral part in emergency safety operation. However, we
need to count on each neighborhood’s cooperative effort in securing life and
safety of every single person. Therefore, SDART-like system that will help
build a structure of mutual support within a community, and provide chances
to learn who live around you and what kind of resources you have is very
valuable. It should be promoted more aggressively so that it will cover all
the Seattle neighborhoods. Remember, in Kobe immediately after the quake,
neighbors helped neighbors. While depending on neighborhood’s efforts, the local
government does have the responsibility of planning and building
infrastructure that can serve to accomplish the city’s sustainability against
disasters. The City is already working on this effort by enforcing building
codes and setting environmentally critical area regulations. However it seems
that the city has not included the idea of emergency safety in its long term
planning of its growth and development. Kobe, on the other hand, building
physical infrastructure or environment to serve emergency safety of the city
is one of the major backbones of their overall planning schemes. Kobe’s effort can be addressed in three major points; 1) to
introduce multi-functional environment that can serve both daily and
emergency situations. 2) to provide neighborhood scale ‘anti-disaster base’
all throughout the city. 3) to build networks to connect neighborhood bases
that are to be coupled with park and open space system. Multi-functional environment for both daily and emergency
situation means a space is not only for the people’s amenity, but also place
to serve citizen’s safety in emergency situations. For instance, a public
park can be designated as an area where people can evacuate from unsafe
structures, gather to wait for rescues or exchange support when disaster
strikes, It can also store equipments and fire fighting water. Providing neighborhood scale bases is planned in Kobe, they
plan to use schools or parks as local emergency operation hub. That’s where
rescue, manpower, information, and goods from the central point are gathered
and distributed to people in the community. Similar concept exists in
Seattle's planning where they are seeing local community centers as emergency
temporary shelters. It is also important to incorporate facilities for
emergency water and energy. Making networks throughout the city provides connections
between the central emergency operation headquater and local hubs. These can
be independent from any vehicular network. Kobe is trying to make use of
riverfront, waterfront, pedestrian corridors to establish emergency network
paths, which are also developed as amenity space to be used by citizens in
normal situations. Seattle, too, can introduce this concept by taking
advantage of our own geographical feature or existing infrastructure, to
build this kind of network that is also used by pedestrian and bicyclists for
their pleasures. Conclusion As a conclusion, what Kobe is teaching us is that the effort
of building sustainable city against natural disaster is a product of mutual
cooperation between the government and citizens. While the government is
responsible in building an overall system and infrastructure for emergency
safety, citizens need to take part in this process by providing advocacy,
leadership, and cooperation to secure the safety of your community. Finally, as a landscape architect, I would like to see my
profession’s role in this endeavor is to contribute our expertise to create the
environment, which is not only aesthetic and recreational, but also
functional so that it can serve the well-being and safety of the people. Thank you. |
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