Good Practices for Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage (ePub)

Dowon Kim is an associate professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ritsumeikan University and a UNESCO Co-Chair holder professor at the Institute of Disaster Mitigation for Urban Cultural Heritage, Ritsumeikan University (R-DMUCH). Since 2014, he has been conducting and organising the International Training Course (ITC) on Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage. His current research focuses on community design of disaster risk management in historical districts nationally and internationally. As for international contribution, he works for the International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness (ICORP) of ICOMOS. The main objective of his research is sharing the best practices of the urban and local communities' sustainability and cultural/social identity, with the method of analytics, field investigation, and communication tools development, and theorising these practices to transfer to the global context. Moreover, he is interested in disaster mitigation planning to balance heritage conservation, using traditional knowledge and community practices in urban heritage.

Lata Shakya is an associate professor at the Institute of Disaster Mitigation for Urban Cultural Heritage R-DMUCH, Ritsumeikan University. She has been serving as a coordinator of the International Training Course on Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage since 2020. She received her doctoral degree in Urban and Environmental Engineering from Kyoto University and pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Tokyo, Department of Architecture, as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow and project researcher from 2013 to 2017. Her research focuses on community resilience to disasters and the sustainability of historic cities. She has conducted research in various urban and rural areas of Nepal and Japan. Her primary field area is the historic city of Patan in Nepal, a courtyard-style settlement that originated from Buddhist monasteries. She is currently involved in disaster mitigation planning of different communities in Patan through workshops with the local community. She is the co-author and coordinator of the book 'The Memory of 2015 Nepal Earthquake, the Experience of Local Residents Utilizing Traditional Resources in UNESCO World Heritage Site' (2019) and a co-author of the book 'Rural and Urban Sustainability Governance' (2014). She was awarded 'The Encouragement Prize of AIJ (Architectural Institute of Japan)', the Doctoral Dissertation Award from Association of Urban Housing Sciences in 2014, and the first JUSOKEN Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2016.