The research project MURATORI is dedicated to the proposal of an innovative multidisciplinary methodology for studying a historical town centre in order to improve its resilience and reduce its vulnerability to seismic actions.
MOTIVATION
The main motivation of this project lies in the well-known seismic vulnerability of Italian historical centres, often subjected to significant damage when seismic events periodically strike the territory. Preservation and resilience of historical centres is fundamental for keeping alive their cultural heritage, together with social and economic aspects related to citizens and companies living in and involved with the town centres. However, damage caused by seismic actions does not affect only public or private buildings, but also the urban context where these buildings are present. Urban centre vulnerability is not just given by the sum of its building vulnerabilities, but it is also related to entire system efficiency, characterized by public spaces that become emergency paths and places in case of seismic actions, and are strictly related to the behaviour of surrounding buildings. Strategic buildings that must remain safe during and after a seismic event, together with the most important public spaces needed for emergency operations, represent the Minimum Urban Structure (MUS). MUS is the part of historical centre to be preserved since it allows an efficient emergency management and a faster reconstruction in case of huge level of damage of ordinary buildings. For these reasons it deserves an accurate vulnerability analysis.
OBJECTIVES
>The final goal of the project is to propose a SHM framework of the MUS of a historical centre, which can become a system equivalent to the Seismic Observatory of Structures, applied to urban scale. This framework aims to be adopted in typical Italian historical centres, it can be shared with local authorities and territorial Civil Protection offices in order to plan prevention activities or emergency interventions.
>Intermediate objective of the project is to develop an accurate numerical multiscale model for performing structural analysis of MUS most important buildings or building aggregates. This model can support SHM framework calibration, but it can represent, alone, an efficient tool for obtaining an accurate knowledge of buildings structural behaviour, for planning or suggesting strengthening interventions before seismic events and first-aid interventions during seismic sequences and plan specific emergency operations.
>Another project objective is to obtain a deep and wide knowledge of historical centre, which is fundamental for developing the structural model and perform more accurate vulnerability analyses, but, more generally, it can increase the awareness of citizens and local authorities about their own built heritage.
METHODOLOGY: WORK PACKAGES (MILESTONES) AND TASKS (ACTIVITIES)
Project is organized in 4 operative work packages (WPs) and a fifth one dedicated to project management and results dissemination.
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