Gaetano Manfredi – författare

The number of megacities worldwide is rapidly increasing and contemporary cities are also expanding fast. As a result, cities and their inhabitants are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic natural events such as extreme weather events (recently more frequent and intense as a result of the ongoing climate changes), earthquakes, tsunamis or man-induced events such as terrorist attacks or accidents. Furthermore, due to increasing technological complexity of urban areas, along with increasing population density, cities are becoming more and more risk attractors.

The resilience of cities against catastrophic events is a major challenge of today. It requires city transformation processes to be rethought, to mitigate the effects of extreme events on the vital functions of cities and communities. Redundancy and robustness of the components of the urban fabric are essential to restore the full efficiency of the city''s vital functions after an extreme event has taken place. These items were addressed by an interdisciplinary and international selection of scientists during the 6th UN-World Urban Forum that was held in Naples, Italy in September 2012.

This volume represents in six chapters the views from sociologists, economists and scientists working on natural risk and physical vulnerability on resilience and sustainability for future cities in relation to natural disasters.

During the past few decades of the 20th and the first years of the present Century, economic losses and human casualties due to natural disasters increased exponentially on our planet, mainly because of the increased density of population and industry in high hazard areas. Although the prediction of earthquakes is not practicable yet, the present technology allows a prompt identification of the onset of any dangerous seismic event before it hits an urban area. Hence early warning- and rapid disaster information systems are becoming important means for strengthening the resilience of our society against the negative consequences of extreme seismic events. Earthquake early warning can provide an alert within a few tens of seconds in advance. This small lead time may be used to minimize property damage and loss of lives in metropolitan areas and to aid emergency response. The book provides information on the major EEW systems in operation and on the state of the art of the different blocks forming an EW system: the rapid detection and estimation of the earthquake’s focal parameters, the signal transmission, the engineering interface and the information reliability/false alarm problem.