Dear Colleagues,

In today’s ever-changing world, civil engineering has the indispensable role of ensuring higher safety levels of constructions, while reducing their impact on the environment through the use of eco-friendly solutions, technologies, and materials. Thanks to the improved knowledge in the fields of earthquake engineering and seismology, the vulnerability of newly conceived constructions has been significantly reduced, thus alleviating the inevitable socio-economic repercussions of disastrous events. At the same time, the other big challenge that civil engineering is facing is that of reducing the vulnerability of the existing built environment, whose fragility is spotlighted at every intense seismic event.

In most advanced countries, the vast majority of buildings and infrastructures do not comply with the safety levels foreseen in modern anti-seismic construction codes. As a result, city centers and older infrastructures, such as highways and railways in urban areas, are likely to undergo high damage levels during an earthquake. Thus, seismic countries with large urban areas have to cope with the concurrent needs of continuously modernizing their cities while at the same time refurbishing and strengthening the built environment. The challenges this conundrum poses are twofold: on the one hand, the environmental impact of new constructions should be reduced by making eco-friendly choices and, on the other hand, waste disposal resulting from works on existing constructions should be minimized by selecting appropriate preservation strategies.

All of the above issues are dealt with within this special issue, which aims at collecting theoretical and applicative studies concerning seismic design and retrofit strategies of buildings and infrastructures using various solutions, from base isolation, dissipative bracings, tuned-mass dampers, new materials, hybrid solutions, to any other innovative technology that fulfills, at the same time, the two apparently opposing requirements of safety and respect for the environment.

Dr. Marco Vailati
Dr. Raihan Rahmat Rabi
Guest Editors

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• resilient city
• seismic retrofitting of structures
• innovative technologies
• preservation strategies