Study on evaluation of city's ability reducing earthquake disasters

In this paper, the current studies and practices on earthquake disaster risk analyses for ur- ban area are reviewed and the achievements and weaknesses are pointed out. For assessing the city's safety to the earthquake disasters, the conception of city's ability for earthquake disaster re- duction is presented. The ability could be evaluated with three basic elements - the possible seis- mic casualty and economic loss during the future earthquakes that are likely to occur in the city and its surroundings and time required for recovery after earthquake. Based upon these three basic ele- ments, a framework, which consists of six main components, for evaluating city's ability reducing earthquake disasters is proposed.