Assessing community resilience, housing recovery and impact of mitigation strategies at the urban scale: a case study after the 2012 Northern Italy Earthquake

Abstract

In this paper, the reconstruction process of a town affected by the 2012 Northern Italy Earthquake is analysed using information published on the town journal. Relevant aspects are highlighted, and the housing recovery is compared with that of a nearby city. Then, a what-if scenario is considered, by proposing a set of seismic mitigation strategies. These strategies are applied to a small sub-system of the city and the variation of the buildings’ vulnerability and expected damage is evaluated using a recently introduced methodology for risk assessments at the urban scale. Finally, a cost–benefit analysis is performed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed strategies. The analysis highlights a significant reduction in the expected damage and socioeconomic impact, as well as an increase in the overall performance of the urban system.

Review of Seismic Risk Mitigation Policies in Earthquake-Prone Countries: Lessons for Earthquake Resilience in the United States

“…Italy has one of the world's oldest building stocks, with a large number of unreinforced masonry (URM) and reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. In the northern cities of Concordia della Secchia and Mirandola, for example, URM buildings account for about 87% and 70% of the building stock, respectively (Basaglia et al 2020). Such buildings were not designed according to modern seismic codes and are subject to substantial earthquake risk.…”

“…In 2017, Italy adopted the "Sismabonus" (or "quake bonus"), a tax incentive policy to motivate building owners to strengthen their buildings (Basaglia et al 2020). The policy allows a tax reimbursement up to 85% of the retrofit cost for structural and nonstructural components, depending on the degree of improvement in the seismic class of the building, with deduction equally distributed over five to ten years (Cosenza et al 2018).…”

“…The amount of tax reimbursement cannot exceed 96,000 Euros for each real estate unit (Caterino and Cosenza 2018). While communities have demonstrated an interest in seismic risk assessment and mitigation, they often lack the necessary information and tools to understand the benefits of seismic strengthening and, in turn, of the "Sisma-bonus" (Basaglia et al 2020).…”

Study on the coupling relationship between urban resilience and urbanization quality—A case study of 14 cities of Liaoning Province in China

“…In recent years, many scholars in China and abroad have studied urban resilience from both the macro and micro perspectives. From a macro perspective focuses on concepts and characteristics, such as the evolution of the concept of resilience [ 6 ], research framework [ 7 , 8 ], action mechanism [ 9 ] and characteristic attributes [ 10 ], etc., to fully grasp urban resilience Definition and development direction; the micro perspective is mostly based on the risks that cities may cope with, such as comprehensive quantitative evaluation of urban disaster resilience to earthquake disasters [ 11 ], extreme weather [ 12 , 13 ], and flood disasters [ 14 ]; or from the basic components build an evaluation system to evaluate urban infrastructure [ 15 , 16 ] economy [ 17 , 18 ], society [ 19 ], ecology [ 20 – 22 ] and other urban subsystems. Carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the degree of urban development.…”

Multiscale Numerical Analysis of TRM-Reinforced Masonry under Diagonal Compression Tests

“…A suitable procedure to select buildings needing structural rehabilitation is out of the scope of the present paper. The authors believe that the proposed numerical approach will be a useful tool for retrofit intervention design [1,2]. Jacketing historical masonry structures with steel-reinforced concrete is among the most conventional techniques for seismic retrofitting.…”