Natural disasters as stress-tests for housing systems. Vulnerability and local resistance to the 2012 earthquake in Italy

Earthquakes often occur in Italy: for built-up areas, they represent exogenous stress tests, acting as catalysts for long-term socio-economic processes and testing local resilience and resistance. This work considers damages to residential buildings after the 2012 earthquake in Emilia, at census tract level. First, cluster analysis points out which are the most vulnerable census tracts in the affected area, according to their socio-economic characteristics; second, quantitative data about reconstruction (released as open data) are adopted to compute a sensitivity index. It emerges that clusters with poorer socio-economic and building conditions have been damaged more than others.