Seismic Resilience Scenario of Algerian Buildings’ Context: Blida City Case Study

Abstract

Several studies have been carried out to assess the building’s seismic vulnerability, to mitigate the seismic risk in urban areas, which is one of the most devastating natural hazards causing considerable economic and human losses. These studies must be incorporated to improve the planning of urban areas to have resistant and resilient cities in case of disasters. The seismic feedback has shown that the build-back-better concept has a direct impact on the city’s economic growth. In this paper, the existing buildings’ resilience is assessed, in order to highlight the capacity of these last to keep the functionality when an earthquake occurs. This building’s resilience has been determined for three types of structures: masonry, reinforced concrete and steel, according to the reconstruction time, the reconstruction cost and the damage state. This last has been assessed from empirical fragility curves developed using the log normal distribution for five structures typologies (Unreinforced masonry; reinforced masonry; RC frame; RC shear walls/Mixed RC frame-RC shear walls and steel structures). A seismic resilience scenario was performed using a geographic information system (GIS) and applied for the Blida city (Algeria) classified as a high seismic zone according to Algerian seismic regulations. According to the results found, the old districts of the Blida city, built mainly during the so-called pre-code period, will not be resilient in case of disaster. The other districts built later in the low-code and high-code periods will have, respectively, medium and good functionality.