Thinking about resilient cities: studying Italian earthquakes

Cities are complex systems that result from the interaction between several factors: urban, socioeconomic and policy strategy overlap factors. These elements interact continuously with one another, which makes governance notably complex, particularly in the case of risk management. This paper focuses on the resilience of cities, with recent Italian earthquakes as case studies. The resilience of cities should undeniably play a fundamental role in seismic risk mitigation and government. The authors highlight that seismic vulnerability (e.g. buildings and lifelines, etc.) seems to be a fundamental topic in resilience. Nevertheless, to investigate the resilience of cities, the problem is strongly multidisciplinary and non-linear. However, to improve earthquake resilience in national, regional or single urban territories, the incorporation of engineering/science (physical), social/economic (behavioural) and institutional dimension (multilevel territorial government) resilience should be considered. Considering that the best strategies cannot be identified to support decision makers, the authors of this paper are working on possible applications of different multicriteria decision-making methods. Only after implementing a new multidisciplinary, multicriteria and multilevel framework to improve resilience will it be possible to define a quantitative evaluation of resilience. Seismic risk management may be considered an optimal conjunction between scientific research and decision making.