Vulnerability Identification and Resilience Enhancements of Urban Environments

A 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 of paramount importance and a growing concern. In view of the growing sensitivity to terrorism and large scale accident scenarios, natural disasters and crime, urban planning practice must incorporate appropriate security measures for vulnerability identification and resilience enhancements.
In this paper the project VITRUV will be presented. The aim is the development of software tools for the consideration of extraordinary threats in the range of urban planning. For the long and complex development process of urban planning the tools moves across three levels 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 event, exposure of personnel and risk including options for risk visualization and risk assessment. Based on an all hazard risk approach, the tools will enable planners,
- 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).
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.