Proactive risk management and integrated knowledge for the governance of urban systems: Urban vulnerability in the case of Gran Santo Domingo

The paper updates and concludes the research presented at the first Symposium ISTH2020, held in Reggio Calabria in May 2014. It discusses a multi-criteria approach to identify urban vulnerability with respect to seismic risk. Starting from the case of Santo Domingo, but with the goal of providing tools for the assessment of urban vulnerability elsewhere, we have elaborated a knowledge-oriented approach aimed at managing different types of vulnerability (morphological, social, and functional). The study proposes a set of criteria for the spatialization of a wide range of indicators of social and morphological vulnerability of the city of Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. This is characterized by a high exposure to risk due to both the probability of seismic hazard (the Haiti earthquake of 2010) and the specific urban vulnerability caused by recent urban growth. The research has been carried out in the framework of the "Estudio de la Amenaza Sismica y Vulnerabilidad Fisica del Gran Santo Domingo" and proposes an original approach to GIS and multi-criteria analysis as effective tools for managing vulnerability assessment. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.