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Nat Hazards (2012) 63:11291156 DOI 10.1007/s11069-012-0209-2
ORIGINAL PAPER
Iuliana Armas
Received: 9 January 2010 / Accepted: 22 April 2012 / Published online: 30 May 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract The expansive infrastructure, along with the high population density, makes cities highly vulnerable to the severe impacts of natural hazards. In the context of an explosive increase in value of the damage caused by natural disasters, the need for evaluating and visualizing the vulnerability of urban areas becomes a necessity in helping practitioners and stakeholders in their decision-making processes. The paper presented is a piece of exploratory research. The overall aim is to develop a spatial vulnerability approach to address earthquake risk, using a semi-quantitative model. The model uses the analytical framework of a spatial GIS-based multi-criteria analysis. For this approach, we have chosen Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, based on its high vulnerability to earthquakes due to a rapid urban growth and the advanced state of decay of the buildings (most of the building stock were built between 1940 and 1977). The spatial result reveals a circular pattern, pinpointing as hot spots the Bucharest historic centre (located on a meadow and river terrace, and with aged building stock) and peripheral areas (isolated from the emergency centers and dened by precarious social and economic conditions). In a sustainable development perspective, the example of Bucharest shows how spatial patterns shape the vulnerability prole of the city, based on which decision makers could develop proper prediction and mitigation strategies and enhance the resilience of cities against the risks resulting from the earthquake hazard.
Keywords Urban area Earthquakes Indicators Vulnerability Capacity
Spatial multi-criteria analysis
1 Introduction
Vulnerability is a dynamic and inner feature specic to any system, which usually becomes visible during a disaster (Thywissen 2006). Vulnerability indicates the potential for loss
I. Armas (&)
Department of Geomorphology, Faculty of Geography, University of Bucharest, 1 Balcescu Bd., 010041 Bucharest, Romaniae-mail: [email protected]
Multi-criteria vulnerability analysis to earthquake hazard of Bucharest, Romania
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(Mitchell 1989), relative to the event intensity, being the central predictive variable in the risk equation (Kates 1985; Dow 1992; Thywissen 2006; Birkmann 2006; Ionescu et al. 2009). Ofcial statistics of the European Commission indicate a signicant increase in value...