Edx Cities and the Challenge of Sustainable development discussion - Tokyo in 2019

Hello from a country of disasters, Japan. I am taking this course for general knowledge. Concentration of population to Tokyo would be the trend due to climate change although decentralization has been called for in my earthquake-prone country for years. The population of Tokyo is 13.94 million and the density is 6,354 as of 2019, and it is estimated by the government that 23,000 will die if this capital is hit directly by a megaquake, which is long overdue. Also, Tokyo barely escaped having a third of it inundated by water from Typhoon Hagibis this October thanks to a huge drainage the government had prepared, an upstream dam which happened to be empty, and a whim of the typhoon course. Meanwhile, the suburbs and the countryside have already been suffering. While 54,000 evacuees from Fukushima are still scattered around Japan according to the Reconstruction Agency, as unusually strong typhoons and large floods started devastating many areas in this country recently, the number of the displaced will increase. Migration from the countryside to the urban areas cannot be avoided... Speaking of infrastructure, I hope that new cities with many storms will choose to bury power lines. We learned the hard way this year that a typhoon can topple steel towers as well as trees, which then tear down power lines, causing massive blackouts for a few weeks. Although everyone here is for burying power lines, doing it after development costs much. Before I finish, let me share with you two pictures I took at the same spot on the Tama river, which flows along the western border of Tokyo, in 2017 and 2019. They show a fraction of the impacts of the typhoons that Japan has experienced over the past two years.