Assessing the residual capacity of buildings for post-earthquake asset management at urban scale

Among the various natural hazards, earthquakes remain a major source of human casualties and economic losses. It is a well-known fact that earthquakes do not kill people; buildings that collapse during earthquakes kill people. Thus architects, civil engineers and urban planners should work in the way of transforming existing cities into resilient systems that are able to withstand seismic events with the least possible losses. Two main challenges regarding seismic resilience at urban scale are related to determining seismic vulnerability prior to earthquakes as well as real damage suffered and residual capacity following a seismic event. Ambient-vibration measurements (AVM) are a non-destructive data source that, together with standard visual inspections, have potential to improve the efficiency and the accuracy of seismic vulnerability assessment of towns. In the pre-earthquake phase, AVM can help in the detection of the real seismic behavior of structures and in the modeling of existing building classes especially in regions with very limited observational data after significant damaging earthquakes. In the post-earthquake phase, AVM can provide information about the real damage suffered and the future damage in case of an aftershock. A methodology for the up-scaling at urban scale of data collected on the various building classes and their damage assessment is proposed and the applicability of clustering buildings is assessed, showing high potential.