Seismic vulnerability of the residential buildings of Florence

The city of Florence, famous all over the world for its historical and artistic heritage, experienced public housing interventions since the XIX century. They consist both in RC and masonry constructions developed during several interventions in the external areas around the historical centre. Florence has been classified “seismic zone” just in 1982 so, most part of the considered population of buildings have been built without seismic criteria. Masonry buildings represent the most significant part of public housing population, characterized by the oldest constructions. This work deals with the vulnerability assessment of masonry public housing interventions at urban scale in Florence. A meaningful database with a large number of selected buildings has been made. Every construction has been investigated adopting an empirical approach based on geometrical and mechanical parameters; houses have been divided into typological classes in function of geometrical and architectonical features. This information has been collected on a GIS platform into a geo-referred system. This allowed a ranking of the public housing population that defines a vulnerability index for different classes of buildings. Further studies will be developed to mix vulnerability features with seismic microzonations of soils and to combine the proposed empirical approach to numerical one in order to investigate representative case-studies adopting mechanical models.