Thinking about resilient cities studying Italian earthquakes

Cities are complex systems that result from the interaction among several factors: urban, social-economic, and policy strategy overlap factors. These elements continuously interact with one another, which makes governance notably complex, particularly in the case of risk management. This paper focuses on resilience of the cities with recent Italian earthquakes as case studies. The resilience of the cities should undeniably play a fundamental role in seismic-risk mitigation and government. The authors highlight that the seismic vulnerability (buildings, lifelines, …) seem to be a fundamental topic in the resilience. Nevertheless, to investigate the resilience of the cities, the problem is strongly multidisciplinary and non-linear. However, to improve the earthquake resilience on national, regional or single urban territory, the incorporate engineering/science (physical), social/economic (behavioural), and institutional-dimension (multi-level territorial government) resilience should be considered. Considering that the best strategies cannot be identified, to support the decision makers, the authors of this paper are working on possible applications of different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. Only after implementing a new multidisciplinary, multi-criteria, and multi-level framework to improve the resilience, it will be possible to define a quantitative evaluation of the resilience. Seismic-risk management may be considered an optimal conjunction between scientific research and decision making.