Natural and Human-Made Hazards Impacts on Urban Areas and Infrastructure

Dear Colleagues,

Hazards, all the way up to disasters, in urban areas, can be approached in various ways, but by far the most suitable way of examining them is that of focusing on their impact. This has been the approach of choice for scientists in the fields of natural sciences and of engineering, and more recently, also social sciences. By contrast, planning to improve prevention or even post-disaster intervention has not been as deeply researched.

In the look to hazards we follow the classification from the book by Cristina Olga Gociman "Tipologia hazardului și dezvoltarea durabilă. Generalități, concept, problematică" (Bucharest: "Ion Mincu" Publishing House, 2000).

We aim at the following natural hazards, but not limited to:

- geological hazards such as earthquake, volcanic eruptions, landslides, giant waves such as tsunami and others,

- meteorological hazards such as heavy rainfall, snowfall, and related movements, heavy winds such as storm, cyclone, hurricane, lightning, drought, flood,

- cosmical hazards.

We aim at the following human-made hazards, but not limited to:

- deforestation, pollution, armed conflict, and terrorism.

As a result, we aim at the following complex hazards:

- fire and forest fire, desertification, explosion, hazards related to water reservoirs, chemical accidents, nuclear accidents, mass migration, epidemics, landscape aggression (including demolition).

The complex relationship between natural and human-made hazards in order to result in complex hazards. We give the example of fire as one of the possible complex hazards (but migration, ex. climate migration, and epidemics as current hazards can also be considered). It can be investigated how drought or thunder from a storm can lead to forest fires as in the recent example in Australia but also recurrent fires in Portugal, Greece, California but not only which affect urban areas and transport infrastructure. Drought and pollution and neighboring fire can lead to urban heat islands. Recent examples of fire hazard affecting heritage in restoration include Notre Dame in Paris, only one example from several of the kind (Bistrița church and Banu Manta in Bucharest, Manege Militaire in Quebec city, the Glasgow school of arts, etc.) which can be put in connection with the potential how also wildfire may have an impact on protection of localities against risks. All these can be considered addressing the following research questions.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather multidisciplinary views from (landscape) architecture, urban planning, seismology, geography, structural engineering, communication sciences, and history on a set of problems including but not limited to:

1. Assessment and mapping methods of natural and human-made hazard impact on urban areas and infrastructure (both prevention and post-disaster);
2. Visualization and communication techniques of assessing impact, including GIS, digital humanities, 3D;
3. Impact reduction strategies for natural and human-made hazards on urban areas and infrastructure;
4. Suitable urban planning methods to mitigate disaster impact in multihazard cases;
5. Partnership models between actors involved in decision processes to mitigate disasters;
6. Urban planning instruments for risk management strategies (e.g., the Master plan);
7. Lessons learned from the relationship among hazard, vulnerability, and impact in recent events;
8. Investigation of urban morphology for better estimations of urban vulnerability (interaction between close buildings, the influence of the position of buildings on soil);
9. Investigation of urban morphology to evaluate post-disaster accessibility of strategic buildings, the role of street patterns for emergency vehicles;
10. Quantitative methods of vulnerability through surveys—the role of statistics;
11. Interactions between urban subsystems which can increase/diminish vulnerability;
12. The difference between the approaches to impact in protected urban areas and that in common areas;
13. Keeping in mind the role of heritage habitat in reconstruction/reshaping efforts after disasters.

Dr. Maria Bostenaru Dan
Dr. Elena Petrova
Guest Editors

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• urban planning
• multicriteria decision
• heritage
• disaster management