Mapping urban limit conditions in the perspective of disaster risk prevention and land management

The destructive effects of earthquakes on the built environment have highlighted the structural fragilities of cities,especially in their old historic centres. In Italy, such effects have caused high social and economic losses, as wellas the complete or partial loss of functionality of cities in the medium and long term and, in the worst cases, theirtotal abandonment. In order to prevent and avoid these dramatic situations and outline policies for enhancingresilience and preparedness within communities, policy makers need predictive tools and models able to estimatedamage scenarios, economic losses, deaths, injuries, homeless, as well as the corresponding beneficial impactsof retrofit interventions at the urban, regional and national scale. This paper presents a framework to map urbanlimit conditions for different earthquake scenarios and performance goals according to the expected percentageof residents in usable buildings as a proxy to measure resilience. The results are aggregated by municipality and byterritorial context based on the population in usable and unusable residential buildings in the short and long timespan due to their structural damages, which are evaluated by means of probabilistic risk assessments and censusdata. The proposed framework is applied to all municipalities in five regions of southern Italy and the resultsare discussed to understand the consequences of housing functionality losses from a resilience perspectiveunderstood as the capacity of an urban system to respond to seismic events and recover from them.