Vulnerability to Earthquake Hazard: Bucharest Case Study, Romania

Abstract

Recent seismic events show that urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to seismic damage, which leads to unprecedented levels of risk. Cities are complex systems and as such their analysis requires a good understanding of the interactions between space and the socioeconomic variables characteristic of the inhabitants of urban space. There is a clear need to develop and test detailed models that describe the behavior of these interactions under seismic impact. This article develops an overall vulnerability index to seismic hazard based on a spatial approach applied to Bucharest, Romania, the most earthquake-prone capital in the European Union. The methodology relies on: (1) spatial post-processed socioeconomic data from the 2011 Romanian census through multicriteria analysis; and (2) analytical methods (the Improved Displacement Coefficient Method and custom-defined vulnerability functions) for estimating damage patterns, incorporated in a GIS environment. We computed vulnerability indices for the 128 census tracts of the city. Model sensitivity assessment tested the robustness of spatially identified patterns of building vulnerability in the face of uncertainty in model inputs. The results show that useful seismic vulnerability indices can be obtained through interdisciplinary approaches that enhance less detailed datasets, which leads lead to better targeted mitigation efforts.

Vertical segregation of apartment building dwellers during late state socialism in Bucharest, Romania

“…Our study confirms that, as much as cities are socially and demographically segregated by sectors (cf. Armaş et al, 2017;Szymon et al, 2014), presocialist-and socialist-era apartment buildings were socially and demographically segregated by floor of residence. Although differing sample sizes preclude direct comparisons of effect sizes from various regression analyses (though positive/negative signs can be compared for directionality), we find it impossible to ignore the fact that virtually identical social and demographic characteristics of individuals are significant predictors of both horizontal (sectoral) and vertical (within building) location of households.…”

“…The data also allows us to link households to corresponding sectors (districts) of Bucharest. Interestingly, horizontal patterns of social segregation were detectable at the macro scale of sectors (districts) in the city in 1992 (Szymon, Gentile, Samuel, & Liviuet al, 2014) and also in the first decade of the 21 st century (Armaş, Dragos, Ionescu, & Gavriş, 2017). Regarding our second motive for choosing Bucharest as the study site: a great majority of empirical studies illustrating vertical social differentiation revolve around capitalist cities at various stages of urbanization and economic development.…”

Earthquake Vulnerability Mapping Using Different Hybrid Models

“…in events such as earthquakes, everyone in the community is vulnerable, but older people and children are the most vulnerable groups in a community and more attention is needed to minimize pain and injury [51]. Children do not tolerate disruption well and older people are psychologically fragile because of their disrupted life rhythms.…”

A Hybrid Analytic Network Process and Artificial Neural Network (ANP-ANN) Model for Urban Earthquake Vulnerability Assessment

“…The amplitude map, derived from Vs30 and geology maps, is then used for seismic microzonation of Tabriz City, and the extent of geographical distribution of damage for a possible deterministic scenario was investigated through considering different fragility curves to describe the damaging behavior of ordinary building types in the city. A variety of data to identify the most vulnerable areas in Bucharest for the earthquake was investigated by [58]. Socio-economic data from censuses in 2002 and 2011 were used to generate an overall spatial vulnerability index, while other variables such as earthquake scenarios and distance to resilience-enhancing points in space (e.g., parks, fire stations, etc.…”