Measuring the Seismic Resilience of Housing Systems in Italy

Abstract

In recent decades, one of the most interesting innovations has undoubtedly been the application of resilience principles to the study and mitigation of seismic risk. However, although new rigorous mathematical models have become available in the context of seismic resilience assessment, their applications to real case studies focus on a local scale, or even single structures. Consequently, new models and procedures are absolutely necessary to adopt resilience measurements in the formulation of mitigation strategies on a national or subnational scale. Given the crucial role of residential buildings in the global resilience of Italian cities against major earthquakes, a new framework for large-scale applications is proposed to roughly measure the seismic resilience of communities through the integration of an empirical recovery function based on the reconstruction process of housing systems in the aftermath of the 2012 Northern Italy Earthquake. As a first attempt, the framework is applied to housing systems in the southern regions of Italy by modelling their physical damage with vulnerability curves defined on the basis of macroseismic approaches. The main results are presented and discussed in terms of average functionality levels over time in order to compare and understand the recovery capacity of the considered housing systems.