This century is the “century of the cities”, where rapid urbanization and greater global connection present unprecedented urban challenges and concentrates risk in urban areas making them increasingly vulnerable (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). The need arises for urban planning must be asked to fully incorporate an understanding of the sub-surface into the deliberation/decision-making process (Howard, 1997). The Urban Geo Footprint (UGF) is classification tool being developed by a sub-group of the Urban Geology Expert Group of EuroGeoSurvey (UGEG) and it is based on a multidisciplinary effort in which different skills and expertise come into play. The main objective of this project is to set up a classification method to identify the main geological and anthropic features that influence city's resilience related to its geological setting. A tool is being developed in order to clustering cities according to their geological and climatic features and to understand why target urban contexts have different issues (e.g. climate change, floods), and thus to assess the cities’ geo-resilience. The UGF will help cities to understand what ‘economic’ and ‘social well-being’ benefits (i.e. in terms of ‘geological resilience’) could derive from urban planning associated with subsoil knowledge. The salient features required for this tool are: - It must be user-friendly and easy to use by scientists and non-scientists - It must be available at European level (and maybe, once is tested in Europe, it could be extended worldwide). The following main 5 drivers are defined in the tool: Geology, Climate, Geohazards, Geomorphology, Subsoil anthropic pressure. The assessment method of UGF tool will consist in testing it with data of different EU pilot-cities. The work in progress is developing a complex worksheet (which can be defined as the «UGF framework») with several quantitative parameters related to the 5 drivers mentioned above. All these parameters are going to be indexed (using scores) and weighted based on two levels of investigation: “basic” and “advanced”. The final result for each city is a general UGF score that will be the combination of all the drivers specific scores. Each tested city will be classified also by the weight of each driver in the calculation. Other objectives of the project are: - Contributing to develop a method for the comparison of data from different cities and update all existing database. - Improving the European collaboration and, therefore, the exchange of ideas on good practices to increase cities’ resilience. - Improving citizens' awareness of both the resources and the threats associated with geology.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2021
