Urban policies and Earthquake Risk mitigation

The paper aims at proposing some considerations about some recent experiences of research carried out on the theme of earthquake risk mitigation and combining policies and actions of mitigation with urban development strategies. The objective was to go beyond the classical methodological approach aiming at defining a “technical” evaluation of the earthquake risk through a procedure which can correlate the three “components” of danger, exposure and vulnerability. These researches experiment, in terms of methodology and application, with a new category of interpretation and strategy: the so-called Struttura Urbana Minima (Minimum urban structure). Actually, the introduction of the Struttura Urbana Minima establishes a different approach towards the theme of safety in the field of earthquake risk, since it leads to a wider viewpoint, combining the building aspect of the issue with the purely urban one, involving not only town planning, but also social and managerial implications. In this sense the constituent logic of these researches is strengthened by two fundamental issues: - The social awareness of earthquake; - The inclusion of mitigation policies in the ordinary strategies for town and territory management. Three main aspects of the first point, that is of the “social awareness of earthquake”, characterize this issue and demand to be considered within a prevention policy: - The central role of the risk as a social production, - The central role of the local community consent, - The central role of the local community capability to plan Therefore, consent, considered not only as acceptance, but above all as participation in the elaboration and implementation of choices, plays a crucial role in the wider issue of prevention policies As far as the second point is concerned, the inclusion of preventive mitigation policies in ordinary strategies for the town and territory management demands the identification of criteria of choice and priorities of intervention and, as a consequence, the opportunity to promote an approach to the theme of mitigation policies realized through strategic principles and systemic logics able to shift the problem from the building to the town. The critical aspects of this theme are tied to three main issues: - The sharing of the way of interpreting town planning, - The integration of multiple objectives in one intervention tool, - The measures which can be adopted for an effective prevention policy. The above-mentioned elements have inspired these researches experimented on Calabrian towns. In particular, in this paper the experience carried out on Reggio Calabria is proposed. Its cultural roots derive from the principles and criteria experimented in small Calabrian towns, but it modifies them according to the complexity of the urban settlement, introducing also some experimental concepts and methodological approaches.