Earthquake hazard in Italy Cluster analysis of socio-economic data to inform place-based policy measures

The Italian Government launched the Piano Casa Italia immediately after the series of massive earthquakes that struck Central Italy in 2016, following the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila and the one in 2012 in Emilia-Romagna. The cumulative impact of human losses and economic and social uncertainty produced by the last disaster in 2016 has spurred political decision-makers to advocate an ambitious long-term intervention, aimed at restructuring Italian public buildings and houses over the next decades. Italy has experienced only one other era of similar schemes with the controversial interventions lasting for more than thirty years of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, which started in the 1950s to cope with the country's dual economic condition. Since then, no other long-term ambitious plan has been attempted in Italy and a similar planning perspective is nowadays far from the experience of most public managers, policy makers and even scholars of economics and development. The ongoing challenges that the Piano Casa Italia has to face are multifaceted: political, economic and social. Challenges pertaining to the agents asked to design the scheme, to implement it and to accept it. The overall perspective of structural change will mark its implementation. This paper is a first contribution within a broader framework to outline the conditions characterizing those challenges and the paths of change that will be initiated by realizing the Plan. The paper suggests taking an analytical perspective to support informed policy measures, in four complementary domains: emergency (National Civil Protection), recovery (Struttura Commissariale), risk reduction (Piano Casa Italia), socio-economic development (National Strategy for Inner Areas). The present contribution starts with a preliminary step, in line with the Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction (UNISDR 2015): a detailed analysis of the socio-economic, demographic and geographic conditions across Italian territorial areas, at a municipality level. This work explicitly aims to single out these features, by focusing both on seismic zones and on regions. The paper also returns the results of a cluster analysis performed at municipality level across Italy and concludes discussing some implications for place-based policy interventions.