Slow Onset Disasters: Linking Urban Built Environment and User-oriented Strategies to Assess and Mitigate Multiple Risks

The book provides an overview of the Slow Onset Disasters (SLOD) in the urban built environment discussing potential strategies to assess and mitigate multiple climate change related risks. Climate change evidence has been reported in the last decades, suggesting that the anthropogenic activities are accelerating these changes towards a warmer and more polluted environment. In this context, SLODs have been linked to climate change related disasters and have been stated to have a higher impact risk within dense built environment (BE). Therefore, the book presents a description of the most relevant SLODs, their significance, and confluence, the way in which scientists and entities are monitoring their progression at different scales, a structured risk assessment strategy and the deconstruction of the BE characteristics that make it more prone to SLODs risk. In addition, it highlights the necessity of adapting the traditional risk assessment methods, to account for different vulnerabilitytypes, including the morphology and materiality of the BE, and the BE users’ characteristics. In fact, individual features influence users’ responses and tolerance to environmental stressors, because of age, health, gender, habits, and behaviour, thus impacting the users’ vulnerability. Exposure can then amplify these issues, since it defines the number of users that can be effectively affected by the SLOD. Starting from this perspective, the book first traces literature-based correlations between individual features, use behaviour, and individual response to the SLOD-altered open spaces. Then, a novel methodology, to quantify the variations of users’ vulnerability and exposure, is offered, to support designers in quickly defining input scenarios for risk assessment and mitigation. Lastly, it demonstrates, through a case study, the SLOD risk assessment framework proposed and the evaluation of the efficacy of risk mitigation strategies.

Prof. Graziano Salvalai, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His research interests focus on innovative construction techniques and in their envelope performance evaluation through energy simulation tools and experimental analysis. He is local coordinator of four Horizon 2020 project, two competitive researches (PRIN) funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and scientific responsible of several research works in the field on energy efficient technologies for buildings. He is the head of the Building Energy Efficient Pilot facility (BEEpilot) that provides a combination of multiscale modelling, testing and numerical analysis for multi-layer dry nZEB Enabler Envelope Solutions (nEES), to develop innovative, pioneering and optimized technology for Zero-emission Buildings. He is author of 3 books and 55 Scopus ranked papers.

Juan Diego Blanco Cadena, Ph.D., is Post-doc Research Associate at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His previous research works have focused on building materials characterization, building performance simulation and monitoring analysis, building operational phase boosted with digital and sensing technologies, methods and strategies to integrate personalized visual comfort and thermal comfort monitoring into building management systems, and outdoor thermal comfort and associated health risks.

Prof. Enrico Quagliarini, full professor of Architectural Engineering, is the Head of the Department of Construction and Civil Engineering and Architecture at the Università Politecnica delle Marche at Ancona (Italy). His research interests focus on the conservation and retrofitting of historic constructions and now mainly deal with the behavioural-based assessment of existing built environments for risk reduction and evacuation strategies in single and multi-hazard events such as slow onset and sudden onset disasters. Reviewer for the most important international journals on these topics, on which he attended over 50 invited lectures in National and International events. He is author of more than 310 international and national scientific papers, including 4 books, and 1 patent. He is also principal investigator/research staff member of several funded National and European competitive research projects.

Gabriele Bernardini is Researcher and Lecturer at Università Politecnica delle Marche at Ancona, Italy. He investigates developing tools for including the users’ factors in building design, operation, and maintenance. His activity is widely focused on users’ safety in the built environment, by involving the building, the open space, and the urban scale. He has developed methods for the analysis of users’ exposure behaviours in case of different emergencies, simulation models and software for evacuation analyses, and innovative systems for increasing users' awareness before disasters.