Resilient and User-Centered Solutions for a Safer Built Environment Against Sudden and Slow Onset Disasters: The BE S2ECURe Project

Abstract

The Built Environment (BE), intended as a network of buildings, infrastructures, and open spaces, has to ensure adequate safety levels to its users in disasters that are unpredictable and quickly appear (SUdden-Onset Disasters-SUODs, e.g., earthquakes, terroristic attacks), as well as in those that emerge gradually over time (SLow-Onset Disasters-SLODs, e.g., climate-change related, pollution, and heat waves). Recent events have underlined the low BE resilience, evidencing the main limitations of current risk-mitigation and prevention solutions, i.e., underestimation of user-centered factors (users’ typologies, crowding, behaviors, others); building-centered strategies excluding neighboring open spaces and correlations between interconnected BEs; ignoring the SUODs–SLODs combination. To face these issues, the Italian PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) BE S2ECURe “Built Environment Safer in Slow and Emergency Conditions through behavioUral assessed/designed Resilient solutions” (supported by MIUR- the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research) intends to develop methods, tools, and guidelines to assess the BE resilience, promote risk-mitigation strategies design, and increase users’ risk awareness by using a holistic user-centered and cross-hazard approach. In this context, BE S2ECURe will take advantages of modeling technologies to represent, classify, and simulate the BE-users system (i.e., based on behavioral simulation models, BIM technologies), as well as promote users’ and stakeholders’ awareness through training solutions (i.e., based on virtual and augmented reality techniques). This work gives origin, objectives, and organization of the project, by underlining the impacts of the innovative approach to BE resilience.