Seismic Cities

Over 50 capital cities of the Least Developed Countries in the world lie on top of faults in regions that are building up significant stresses within the crust. This continually growing stress will eventually lead to future earthquakes. Earthquakes are a natural hazard that are killing an increasing number of people, in part because populations are growing and densifying into urban centres. The recurrence time between earthquakes may be hundreds of years; many cities that are large today were small towns or non-existent in the past when the last big earthquake struck. There is often little social and community memory and first-hand experience of these previous events. Furthermore, urban development in the intervening years has often hidden the expressions of the active earthquake faults beneath and around a city, making them harder to identify today. In the Least Developed Countries, the impact of earthquakes on people's lives and livelihoods is much greater due to the vulnerability of buildings and communities.

A major challenge has been to ensure that the mitigation of earthquake risk is a high priority in vulnerable cities, where earthquakes rarely occur but are devastating when they do. This is particularly difficult in cities in the least developed countries, where building earthquake resilience has to be balanced against other economic & social pressures facing cities & their development. We will develop a blueprint for the concept of "Seismic Cities", which we believe will be a powerful approach for raising awareness of the devastating potential of earthquakes in cities & for making them more sustainable & resilient to such shocks. This will be a biennial workshop & event that will bring together a range of stakeholders to target communities vulnerable to seismic hazard, and to develop more sustainable cities that can better cope with future environmental shocks from earthquakes. This will build on an existing successful concept of Cities On Volcanoes-a biennial conference and series of workshops that aims to reduce the impacts of volcanism & its effects on society by understanding volcanic phenomena, recognising the hazards & their impacts on people, emergency management, community education, case histories & risk mitigation.

In order to test the effectiveness of our methodological approaches, as well as help develop the Seismic Cities concept, we will target a large city that has recently experience major earthquakes-Santiago in Chile. We will conduct interviews & focus groups with communities in the city to explore their own perceptions of risk & coping strategies. We will also document these experiences through story-telling & sensory mapping of the built environment, & create a virtual archive of these to which the community can add. Through co-production methods such as focus groups, walking trails, mobile interviewing, live projections & tours of both historic & contemporary urban sites, valuable data on the effects of earthquakes & their potential danger will be gathered. We will use satellite imagery to construct a 3D model of the built environment & highlight active fault structures within the city, integrating this with the community resources to better communicate the findings derived from the scientific data. The strategies to best prepare & protect the community can be embedded as community members become responsible for mapping & curating their own lived environments.

The long-term (20-year) aim is to raise resilience to earthquake hazard across the whole world to the standards of the US, New Zealand & Japan. This is particularly challenging for many ODA-Recipient countries, where awareness of the threat from earthquakes may be low, & where increasing resilience to earthquake hazard may be a low priority. We envisage Seismic Cities as a flagship, high-profile event that significantly raises awareness in the host city, among both professionals & the public, drawing focus & resources to that city.

The long-term goal of this project is to increase resilience to seismic hazard in major cities at risk of earthquakes by developing a blueprint for biennial Seismic Cities events. The beneficiaries of these events will be members of the public and the civil defence communities in the cities at risk of earthquakes, particularly in those cities that host the events.

In the short-term, however, most of the immediate beneficiaries will be in Santiago, Chile, where we will carry out much of the scoping work for this project. The group that will benefit first from this proposal are the individuals in communities living around the San Ramon Fault in Santiago, Chile. They will benefit directly from an increased awareness of a local earthquake hazard from the nearby fault at the edge of the city (only recently recognised as active), which could lead to earthquakes that are different to the distant subduction zone earthquakes that the residents are more aware of. This will improve the level of preparedness and resilience for such an unexpected type of earthquake. The benefit would be realised in the event of such an earthquake occurring, in terms of reduced number of fatalities and serious injuries, and improved recovery and coping strategies to deal with disaster.

In the short-term of the project duration itself, 9 months, the primary beneficiaries will be those with which we engage directly. Chile has a large level of inequality income and we will target those communities at the intersection of groups experiencing economic deprivation, and those living where we expect the greatest level of ground shaking due to seismic wave amplification in the Santiago Basin.

To widen the impact of this project, we have engaged with the Resilience Department of the local government in Santiago, in particular the Chief Resilience Officer (CRO-Gabriella Elguete) and sub-CRO (Christian Robertson) who we will be working with us on this proposal (see letter from the Governor of Santiago). The Resilience Department will benefit from the outputs of this project in terms of information on the awareness of communities to seismic hazards and their existing plans, as well as provision of a high resolution open access topographic dataset which will be of use in civic planning. By providing information on the level of awareness and coping strategies of vulnerable communities, we will enable the department to better inform policy regarding current and future housing planning, as well as emergency planners for such events.

Following the project, the medium-term (few years) beneficiaries would expand to become city-wide across Santiago as the short-term benefits are propagated through the Resilience Department of the local government. Over the next decade in Santiago, beneficiaries will include those whose houses were seismically reinforced and adequately insured as part of improved development planning, as well as those who planned houses were move away from being built on top of the fault during the continued urban expansion to the east of the city onto the San Ramon Fault.

With the development of the Seismic Cities concept we will then extend this approach to another city on the DAC list (potential Seismic Cities are listed in the ODA compliance section). In ten years, we expect beneficiaries of the Seismic Cities projects to extend to five other cities spread across the DAC list of countries. Citizens in each city will benefit from a targeted focus of research interest and public engagement, as well as learning from the experiences of other cities in building resilience and more sustainable communities.