Nurturing Virtual Collaborative Networks into Urban Resilience for Seismic Hazards Mitigation

A holistic analysis of the resilience of the built environment in relation to natural disasters needs to consider multidimensional parameters being interactive and mutually influencing each other as a collaborative network, including the physical side of the urban framework (e.g., structures and infrastructures) and the socio-organizational system (e.g., stakeholders, designers and governments). In this paper, an analysis is conducted to first provide a categorization of several dimensions that characterize the urban context, such as damage and structural typology, urban connectivity, building functionality. These factors have been then related to the resilience of the built environment in the context of the urban system considered as a collaborative network in order to point out the relevant interdependencies between its components. Particularly, this is meant to identify the relevant socio-organizational nodes, their interaction and how their collaboration can reflect on the physical network. The analysis is based on the real data from Old Beichuan, a town severely destroyed in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China.