Urban seismic risk model for resilient cities. The case of Thessaloniki

Abstract

Seismic risk assessment and loss estimation are of major importance for decision-making with respect to the reduction of earthquake-induced losses at local, urban, national and even continental scale. In this study we present a preliminary model for the probabilistic seismic risk assessment at urban scale. The studied model will be applied to the residential building stock of Thessaloniki, Greece, for which detailed building inventory and very good knowledge of the soil conditions are available. The applied model comprises three main components, i.e., seismic hazard, building exposure model and physical - socioeconomic vulnerability models. Seismic hazard for rock site conditions is properly amplified to account for site effects of Thessaloniki city, considering the available detailed data of the soil conditions. Exposure model for residential buildings of Thessaloniki is developed based on the results from the 2011 Population and Housing Census. Both physical and socioeconomic losses were considered. For the assessment of the physical and socioeconomic losses we applied the fragility and vulnerability models developed for Greece by GEM. The work has been conducted in the framework of SERA European project (http://www.sera-eu.org/en/home/), which aims at developing a pan-European seismic risk model, applicable at both urban and national risk assessment. The model developed in this work will contribute to the efforts towards increasing the resilience of cities.