Vulnerability Identification and Resilience Enhancements of Urban Environments

Abstract

Steadily increasing number of the world’s population is living in urban centres. The issue of security and citizen safety in densely populated areas is a growing concern. Considering terrorism and large scale accident scenarios, natural disasters and crime, urban planning practice must be complemented with vulnerability identification and resilience enhancements methods.

The VITRUV project, funded by the European Commission under its FP7 Research & Technical Development Programme, is carried out by a consortium of 12 industry partners, public end-users and research institutions drawn from 8 European countries. The aim is the development of software tools for the consideration of extraordinary threats. For the complex process of urban planning the tools supports the planning process through all three planning stages, from concept to plan and detail design, compatible with existing planning formats and software solutions. The qualitative or quantitative hazard and risk analysis of single buildings of infrastructure forms the basis. It consists of the analysis of events, scenarios, hazards, damage, frequency of events, exposure of personnel and risk including options for risk visualization and risk assessment for plan and detail level. Based on an all hazard risk approach, the tools will enable planners.

• to include a security assessment and security knowledge in their planning process, in order to make well-considered systematic qualitative decisions (concept level),

• to analyse the susceptibility of urban spaces with respect to new threats (plan level), and

• to perform vulnerability analysis of urban spaces by computing the likely damage on humans, buildings and traffic infrastructure (detail level).