This book, which is the second volume in a new series “Environmental hazards”, addresses a topic very much neglected in current research: the role of urban planning in earthquake disaster management. It is not a book about earthquake engineering issues but rather about management issues. Social sciences and arts are often disregarded in earthquake disaster management, the focus being mostly on technical aspects. But the study of the impact is important in order to facilitate appropriate implementation through transferring research knowledge to decision makers. The work is aimed at both junior and senior researchers creating the basis for new university curriculum, as there are very few courses in this field. The volume is organised in four sections, addressing the ‘reaction’ side of earthquake disaster management: vulnerability, planning, risk assessment and reconstruction. Each section addresses issues for decision makers, some at the level of participatory planning, as well as the role of specialists from urban planning, geography, engineering and seismology/earth sciences, while technical sciences include civil engineering and remote sensing/geo-information. We present the current state of the art in approaching the problems, the current challenges for further research and issue recommendations based on the results of current research. The work aims to reach a balance between dealing with existing heritage and new planning, because even in the twenty-first century new planning has to rely on lessons from the past. Another balance is reached between dealing with the technical and the humanities/social sciences approach, as reflected in the topic and the research methodology adopted. Case studies are emphasized, mostly from Italy and Romania, two countries that have experienced different types of earthquakes.

Classically, the discipline dealing with earthquakes is called ‘earthquake engineering’ and considered to be a branch of structural engineering. Thus, in case of projects dealing with strategies for earthquake risk mitigation, approaches from architecture, urbanism and geosciences other than seismology are often ignored. The contribution of architecture and urbanism to natural hazards mitigation is however important as:

retrofitting interventions are performed many times on heritage buildings, or, more generally, on buildings with cultural value,

today interventions are needed not only at building scale, but at city scale.

For implementing risk reduction strategies, urban planning plays a key role, interventions can only take place with the support of the affected people, their acceptance being influenced by the quality of landmarks (after Lynch 1960, ‘The Image of the city’) built by architectural objects which are bearers of memory.

This work approaches the impact of earthquakes, with a broader view on multihazard on urban areas. It is different from other similar works because it gives a particular importance to urban planning and architecture issues, such as integrated conservation. The majority of papers included in the book assert the impact of hazards on historical sites in case of earthquakes which shook the world and focusing on the need of rebuilding. Other papers emphasize pioneering approaches such as the Abbruzzo 2009 earthquake approach on which more research is still needed, the usage of social housing for reconstruction need and the outreach of urban planning issues towards public education and civil protection fields.

The expansive infrastructure, along with the high population density, makes cities highly vulnerable to the severe impacts of natural hazards. In the context of an explosive increase in value of the damage caused by natural disasters, the need for evaluating and visualizing the vulnerability of urban areas becomes a necessity in helping practitioners and stakeholders in their decision-making processes. The paper presented is a piece of exploratory research. The overall aim is to develop a spatial vulnerability approach to address earthquake risk, using a semi-quantitative model. The model uses the analytical framework of a spatial GIS-based multi-criteria analysis. For this approach, we have chosen Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, based on its high vulnerability to earthquakes due to a rapid urban growth and the advanced state of decay of the buildings (most of the building stock were built between 1940 and 1977). The spatial result reveals a circular pattern, pinpointing as hot spots the Bucharest historic centre (located on a meadow and river terrace, and with aged building stock) and peripheral areas (isolated from the emergency centers and defined by precarious social and economic conditions). In a sustainable development perspective, the example of Bucharest shows how spatial patterns shape the “vulnerability profile” of the city, based on which decision makers could develop proper prediction and mitigation strategies and enhance the resilience of cities against the risks resulting from the earthquake hazard.

The current paper is a piece of exploratory research, having as its purpose the evaluation of seismic risk spatial patterns for Bucharest, the capital of Romania. In this paper, risk (expressed in terms of risk indices) is calculated as a combination of hazard and vulnerability information, based on the semi-quantitative technique of multi-criteria spatial analysis. The scale of analysis was considered at the level of the census units (2002). The hazard component consists of the probability of occurrence of two scenarios: (1) an occurred earthquake that is a typical hazard case for the Vrancea region (event of 30 August 1986, M_w = 7.1) and (2) a computed seismic hazard for the largest magnitude earthquake expected to be generated in Vrancea (M_w = 7.7). In both cases, the seismic hazard is expressed in terms of peak ground acceleration (PGA) values. The total vulnerability index is obtained using four groups of indicators: natural environment, physical, social and economical indicators. The overall vulnerability to seismic hazard is assessed by comparing total vulnerability with the compound capacity factor. The resulting risk indices are relative, expressed by numerical values, ranging between 0 and 1, that do not have a direct meaning of expected losses. The spatial pattern of risk shows a significant increase in the case of the maximum expected event as compared with the 1986 earthquake case, particularly in the central part of the city. As a general conclusion, only the strongest earthquakes are really dangerous for Bucharest.

This chapter aims at retrieving the old landscapes which are currently ‘lost’ in time, as well as in space, by comparing maps dating from different historical periods. The traces of old landscapes are gradually disappearing, especially because their existence was not linked to the present inhabitants’ concrete experiences. Based on the large-scale historical maps (1:25,000–1:57,600) dating back to 1769–1980, six case studies in Romania were analysed (in a GIS open source environment) covering several types of landscapes: rural, urban, agricultural, forests, and vineyards. Ada-Kaleh Island and Orşova City were flooded after settling the Iron Gates Lake (1970–1971). Eteni and Lăteni villages disappeared following the floods produced by the Someş (1970) and Danube Rivers (1942). The well-groomed cemetery still bears witness of the existence of Eteni village. The painful history of the villages in Bărăgan where people were deported for political reasons, did not last long in Lăteşti village (1951–1976), but it was intense. In order to find out how interested young people nowadays are in past landscapes, but also how they relate to old disappeared landscapes, a questionnaire was given to first-year students at the Faculty of Geography within the University of Bucharest. Their responses proved that 85% of the students are interested in past landscapes, but at the same time, 58% were unaware of the fact that Orşova City had been covered by the Iron Gates Lake, 69% hadn’t heard of Ada-Kaleh Island, and 92% were not familiar with the cause of its disappearance. Forty-nine percent of respondents didn’t know that a great part of Vlăsia Forests (Codrii Vlăsiei) had disappeared from Bucharest’s metropolitan area by the beginning of the twentieth century, being replaced with urban, rural, or agricultural landscapes.

Recent seismic events show that urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to seismic damage, which leads to unprecedented levels of risk. Cities are complex systems and as such their analysis requires a good understanding of the interactions between space and the socioeconomic variables characteristic of the inhabitants of urban space. There is a clear need to develop and test detailed models that describe the behavior of these interactions under seismic impact. This article develops an overall vulnerability index to seismic hazard based on a spatial approach applied to Bucharest, Romania, the most earthquake-prone capital in the European Union. The methodology relies on: (1) spatial post-processed socioeconomic data from the 2011 Romanian census through multicriteria analysis; and (2) analytical methods (the Improved Displacement Coefficient Method and custom-defined vulnerability functions) for estimating damage patterns, incorporated in a GIS environment. We computed vulnerability indices for the 128 census tracts of the city. Model sensitivity assessment tested the robustness of spatially identified patterns of building vulnerability in the face of uncertainty in model inputs. The results show that useful seismic vulnerability indices can be obtained through interdisciplinary approaches that enhance less detailed datasets, which leads lead to better targeted mitigation efforts.

The objective of this chapter is to present a GIS-based application to visualise and analyse downstream flooding, following a hypothetical Bicaz dam failure on the Bistrita River, Romania. The assumptions of the dam failure scenario are: 50 % breach of the dam surface coupled with a 10,000-year flood. The inundation maps and the dam break flood wave characteristics (depth, velocity, and travel time) are obtained through numerical simulations using a hydraulic model (HEC-RAS) and the best available topographic data. Analysis of flood inundation maps by using GIS tools is crucial for risk assessment and for the emergency preparedness to protect against the loss of life and property damage. Vulnerability maps resulting from a multicriteria analysis are used to explore the potentially affected areas, and a loss analysis (as a simplified quantitative risk analysis) is performed on the physical environment for the city of Bacău, as examples of GIS graphical capabilities.

The focus of this study is to assess the evolution of forest cover, as forest is an important indicator to describe the perceived naturalness of landscapes and has undergone radical changes in the last hundred years in Europe. The Subcarpathic sector of Prahova River was chosen as study area, because it has always been densely populated and its landscape has transformed by long-term man-made impact on the environment. Forest landscape spatial changes are highlighted in a temporal context based on large-scale historical maps and aerial images in a GIS environment. Different metrics are applied to quantify spatial changes of forest distribution and the pattern of changes over a 223 years period. The most important deforestations were recorded between 1790 and 1856 being correlated with the massive deforestation of Tara Romaneasca (the Southern Princedom of Romania), reported after the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) that liberalized trade and made wood an export product. An increase in forest cover took place between 1900 and 1980. Between 1980 and 1997, after the communist regime change (1989) and in the transition period, forest cover declined with the largest annual intensity, among causes are the restitution of forests to individual owners (followed by deforestation), legislative void, etc. Between 1997 and 2005, a slight tendency for reforestation was recorded. Comparison between 1790 and 2013 forest cover shows that almost 58 % of the landscape forest was destroyed, changing its use. Based on the index of naturalness, Prahova River Subcarpathic Valley has been included in the category of land insufficiently covered by forests for the entire period of analysis.