Assessment of City Resilience Using Urban Indicators in Japanese Cities

Conducting assessments using urban indicators based on public statistical information helps us understand the actual conditions and resilience of our cities and communities. Thereby it enhances our ability to resist, adapt to, and recover from devastating disasters. The outcomes of such assessments facilitate policymakers, government officers, businesses, citizens, and other stakeholders to detect weak points of the target city in comparison with other cities. In this light, various sets of indicators have been developed to assess the resilience of cities. Discussions on developing an international standard for resilience indicators have also started in a working group under the technical committee of the International Organization for Standardization. This chapter first briefly introduces the background of some important campaigns and movements for making cities more resilient. Next, two case studies of the assessment of city resilience in Japan are introduced. One is the case of introducing time-series assessments of a disaster-affected city to monitor the recovery process after a catastrophic earthquake using the CASBEE-City city-scale assessment tool. The other is the case of conducting the resilience assessment targeting major cities in Japan. These two studies show the importance of conducting the resilience assessment using urban indicators together with public statistical information.