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Seismic vulnerability and risk assessment at the scale of the Old City Centre

Proceedings article published in 2010 by Romeu Vicente, Tiago M. Ferreira, Humberto Varum ORCID, Aníbal Costa, Rui Maio
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Question mark in circle
Preprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Postprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Published version: policy unknown

Abstract

Risk mitigation is considered essential in the activity and definition of strategic planning and urban management. The evaluation of the seismic vulnerability of the existent building stock in the perspective of the seismic risk mitigation should be placed as one of the first actions, not only when initiating a rehabilitation process for a building of relevant historical and cultural importance, as well as in relation to urban areas with old traditional building stock, architecturally-valued. Due to the diachronic construction process of the urban mesh, buildings do not constitute independent units, sharing the mid-walls with adjacent buildings with aligned facade walls. Therefore, buildings do not have an independent structural behaviour, but they interact amongst themselves, mainly for horizontal actions. In this sense, their structural performance should be studied at the level of the aggregate and not only for each isolated building. Moreover, when an assessment at the level of a city centre is pursued, the use of simplified methodologies based on a vulnerability index obtained from the singular evaluation of qualitative and quantitative parameters assume themselves as one of the most adequate and reliability solutions, allowing the evaluation of physical damage and the creation of loss scenarios (economical and human). From the exposed, this paper presents and discusses a new calibration for a simplified vulnerability index methodology, already developed and applied to different case studies in Portugal, namely Coimbra, Seixal and Horta, in Faial.