Large-Scale Seismic Vulnerability Assessment Method for Urban Centres. An Application to the City of Florence

The seismic vulnerability assessment of a building requires a comprehensive knowledge of both building structural features and soils geophysical parameters. To achieve a vulnerability assessment at the urban scale a large amount of data would be necessary, with a consequent involvement of time and economical resources. The aim of this paper is hence to propose a simplified procedure to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of urban centres and possible seismic damage scenarios in order to identify critical areas and/or building typologies to plan future actions of seismic risk mitigation and prevention. The procedure is applied to the outstanding case study of the city of Florence. The research is based on the definition of major building typologies related to construction periods and type of the structural system (masonry or reinforced concrete), the identification of a set of sample buildings, the analysis of the dynamic behaviour and the evaluation of a vulnerability index with an expeditious approach. The obtained results allow to define potential vulnerability and post-event damage scenarios related to the expected levels of peak ground acceleration.