In this paper, an integrated urban earthquake vulnerability assessment framework, which considers vulnerability of urban environment in a holistic manner and performs the vulnerability assessment for the neighborhood scale, is proposed. The main motivation behind this approach is the inability to implement existing vulnerability assessment methodologies for countries like Turkey, where the required data are usually missing or inadequate for the decision-makers in prioritization their limited resources for risk reduction in the administrative units from which they are responsible for. The methodology integrates socio-economical, structural, coastal, ground condition, vulnerabilities (fragilities), as well as accessibility to critical services. The proposed methodology is implemented for Eskisehir, which is one of the metropolitans of Turkey. In the implementation of the proposed framework, geographic information system (GIS) is used. While the overall vulnerabilities obtained for neighborhoods are mapped in GIS, the overall vulnerabilities obtained for buildings are visualized in 3D city model. The main reason behind using different mapping and visualization tools for vulnerabilities is to provide better ways for communicating with decision-makers. The implementation of the proposed vulnerability assessment methodology indicates that an urban area may have different vulnerability patterns in terms of structural, socio-economical, and accessibility to critical services. When such patterns are
The spatio-temporal analysis of residential fires could allow decision makers to plan effective resource allocations in fire management according to fire clustering levels in space and time. In this study, we provide guidelines for the use of various methods in detecting the differences in clustering patterns of fire and non-fire (i.e., background residential) locations and how these patterns change over time. As a preliminary analysis step, various exploratory data analysis methods, such as, intensity plots (i.e., kernel density estimates) are used. Moreover, the use of Diggle's D -function (a second order analysis technique) is proposed for detecting the clustering of residential fire locations (if any) and whether there is additional clustering (or regularity) in the locations of the fires compared to background residential pattern. A test for trend over time (in years, months, and weeks) of the fire location patterns are provided with a space-time interaction analysis by spatio-temporal K -function. Residential fire data from Çankaya Municipality of Ankara, Turkey is used as an illustrative example. The presented methodology is also applicable to residential fire data from similar urban settings.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.