MULTI SCALE URBAN MODELLING TO IMPROVE THE RECOVERABILITY OF CITIES EXPOSED TO MULTIPLE NATURAL HAZARDS

A resilient urban system should be able to recover from a disaster as quickly and effectively as possible. The optimal time to begin planning and implementing recovery investments to improve the urban system's recoverability is before the disaster. Considering that usually there are insufficient resources to invest in all urban facilities and infrastructures, in this research, the concept of Minimum Urban System that assures the Safeguarding of the Settlement is developed. This concept refers to the “subset of assets” of the urban system to be preserved to ensure continuing recovery efforts after a disaster and must be determined in accordance with some defined criteria that indicate the relative socio-economic worth of the various assets and the significance of their contribution to the urban system's performance. When the urban system is exposed to multiple and potentially interacting (such as cascading, consecutive, compound, etc.) risks, the assets' contribution to the system's ability to deal with these complex multi-risk conditions needs to be considered and integrated into the minimum urban system determination. In light of this, the goal of this work is to establish a methodological framework in three spatial scales (macro, meso and micro) to model the urban system, and identify its most crucial components - and their interdependencies - as the minimum urban system.