Hazard impact on settlements: the role of urban and structural morphology
Abstract. We aim to create an alternative to GIS representation of the impact of hazards on urban areas. To accomplish this, we revise the traditional map, so that it can cope with today's innovative ways of planning, namely strategic planning. As in the theory of fractals, we address the building dimension and the urban neighbourhood dimension as different geographic scales between which lessons for decisions can be learned through regression. The interaction between the two scales can be seen when looking for alternatives or the completion of a GIS analysis, or in chosing the landmarks, which, in the case of hazards, become strategic elements in strategic planning. A methodology to innovate mapping as a digital means for analysing and visualising the impact of hazards has been developed. This new method relies on concepts from various geography, urban planning, structural engineering and architecture approaches related to disaster management. The method has been tested at the building scale for the central N–S boulevard in Bucharest, Romania, comprising the protected urban zone 04 "Magheru". At the urban scale, an incident database has been created, in which the case study for the building level can be mapped. The paper presented is part of a larger research work, which addresses decision making using the framework shown here. The main value of the paper is in proposing a conceptual framework to deconstruct the map for digital disaster impact analysis and representation. This concept is highly original, because it considers the representation of elements at different scales to be of different importance in the urban tissue, according to the analysis to be performed on them.