The Potential of Open Space for Enhancing Urban Seismic Resilience: A literature Review

Abstract

For a city to perform successfully, and its citizens to feel safe and comfortable, the health of basic urban components and the overall resilience of the urban system is crucial. As the importance of the resilient urban system has been recognized in the scientific literature, many studies have been done on this topic. Therefore, to find out the gaps in the existing literature and the opportunities for further research, a new systematic literature review has been performed in three stages. Different bibliographic techniques (co-occurrence and co-citation analysis) have been applied and, in the final stage of the analysis, an in-depth study of the content of the selected papers addressing open space in relation to urban seismic resilience has been carried out. The obtained results and trends have shown a lack of research on the potential of open space for enhancing urban seismic resilience, as well as a challenge for its quantitative assessment. The ability of the affected resilient system is to achieve at least a pre-disaster performance level in an acceptable time, which can be gained, among others, by using the restorative potential of open space. Based on the synthesis of these findings the authors’ draft model of an urban system integrating the potential of open space is presented in terms of a complex network theory.