Terrorist Risk in Urban Outdoor Built Environment : Measuring and Mitigating via Behavioural Design Approach

This open access book outlines the latest results in analysing, assessing, and managing terrorist risk in the urban outdoor built environment. In detail, contents refer to the outdoor Open Areas (such as streets, squares, urban parks and other public spaces in our cities) exposed to such violent events considering the physical elements and properties of the built environment and users. PThe built environment features, including layout, use and management, are combined with terrorist threats issues and user behaviours in emergency conditions, to determine a set of complementary tools for the reduction of risk and increase of urban resilience.  The contents hence provide different levels of tool analysis, for risk scenario definition,  risk assessment, mitigation strategies design and effectiveness evaluation, considering traditional approaches about the issue along with simulation-based approaches relying on understanding and representing user behaviors. This “behavioural design” approach offers the opportunity to manage the level of risk for specific real urban cases over going the normative limitations in Europe that are only referred to few countries and sometimes deal with the prevention of violent acts by intelligence activities as the exclusive way to face this issue. In addition, the focus on the characters of cultural and historic places and their resilience is increasing by means of introduction of mitigation and compatible solutions providing a complementary chapter for the design of resilient cities in all of their peculiarities (peripheries, consolidated, and historical).

In this sense, it is one of the first organized attempts to analyse the main limitations of current solutions in these outdoor Open Areas and, at the same time, to clearly introduce the importance of human behaviours and the various choices in emergency evacuation conditions, thanks to the proposed behavioural-based simulation approach. The attention is focused on a critical aspect for historic spaces, where morphological conditions are fixed values. Thus, this book represents a sort of guidelines about these user-related issues during such violent events and is useful to both professionals and researchers in the areas of security and urban administration.

Dr. Gabriele Bernardini is a researcher and lecturer in “Architectural Engineering” at the Università Politecnica delle Marche at Ancona (Italy). His research activity focuses onithe development of methods and tools to include user-cenetered factors in building design, operation, and maintenance. In this context, his work is widely focused on users’ safety in the built environment (i.e. emergency and evacuation), by involving the building, the open space, and the urban scale. He develops methods for the analysis of users’ exposure behaviours in case of different emergencies, simulation models and software for evacuation analyses, including those for terrorist risk, and innovative systems for helping people during an emergency in historical scenarios.

 Dr. Elena Cantatore is Professor Assistant in “Architectural Engineering” at the Polytechnic of Bari (Italy). Her scientific work deals with the recovery and maintenance strategies of cultural heritage and historic built environment, focusing on the effects generated by natural processes and climate change. She has reached specific research goals in using VR-based and parametric CityGML-based models for the recovery and management of architectural Cultural Heritage. Furthermore, other scientific activities relate to the normative and scientific analysis of the terrorist phenomenon in Europe in order to set up, calibrate and test algorithms for the assessment of the associated risk and the potential mitigation of strategies in real case studies.

 Prof. Fabio Fatiguso is Full Professor in “Architectural Engineering” and "Building refurbishment and requalification" at the Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy). He is president of the national association of the Scientific Society of Architectural Engineering “Ar.Tec”. His research and scientific activity relate to building refurbishment and maintenance, with particular reference to material, technological and functional aspects, as well as to techniques and technologies for diagnostics and control. Other research lines are related to the development of immersive VR/AR environments and HBIM approaches for multilevel assessment and diagnosis of building characteristics and pathologies. Moreover, he is the supervisor of activities related to terrorism risk, coordinating the process of solutions inventory, the identification of criteria for compatible solutions.

Prof. Enrico Quagliarini is full professor in “Architectural Engineering” and currently the head of the Department of Civil Engineering, Construction and Architecture, at the Università Politecnica delle Marche at Ancona (Italy). His scientific and research activities concern the conservation and retrofitting of existing built environments, as well as their behavioural-based assessment for designing risk reduction and evacuation strategies in single and multi-hazard such as terrorist acts, earthquake, flood, fire and overcrowding. These activities are oriented towards users’ behaviours testing, analysis and modelling, mainly devoted to outdoor and urban scenarios, and also cover the development, validation and application of simulation (i.e. agent-based) tools. Moreover, he is the principal investigator of the BE S2ECURe project - “(make) Built Environment Safer in Slow and Emergency Conditions through behavioUral assessed/designed Resilient solutions” (www.en.bes2ecure.net), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, that financially supported the reaching of this book outcomes and of its authors.