Improving the understanding of Site-City Interactions for better earthquake risk mitigation (USCINT)

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Since earthquakes can neither be prevented nor predicted, improving the planning of urban areas is an important issue to reduce damage to built environment and human losses. Planning of urban areas may be significantly improved if the variability of ground shaking over short distances that is known to occur during earthquakes is taken into account. When an earthquake occurs, besides the alterations of waves in the shallow geological layers, the interactions between single buildings and the soil might also contribute to modification of ground shaking, and thus, to seismic risk. In urban areas, these interactions are not limited to interactions between single buildings and the soil, but include interactions of an entire city and the soil. Since these interactions are not understood in detail as yet, they are not taken into account in the planning of urban areas and seismic risk assessment and mitigation. Until now, most studies of these effects have been carried out by numerical simulations without the possibility of a comparison between the predicted and the observed seismic wave fields. Only a very limited number of analyses tried to tackle the problem based on empirical data sets. The project USCINT aims at improving our understanding of interactions between buildings and the soil and among buildings through the soil during earthquake shaking by using both a unique empirical data set and numerical modeling. Better understanding of the interactions between buildings and the soil may contribute to the identification of areas of higher seismic risk and thus, to a better preparedness in case of an earthquake. Furthermore, this knowledge could be included in guidelines for standard risk assessment and mitigation approaches in urban areas. Finally, improving urban planning in the long term by taking soil-structure interaction and site-city interaction effects into account, can contribute to reduction of seismic risk.