Abstract

The analysis of earthquake-induced damage scenarios at the urban scale is a fundamental tool for seismic risk assessment and mitigation and the management of urbanized areas exposed to seismic hazards. This paper presents a methodology for simulating earthquake damage scenarios over large urban territories that explicitly accounts for the cumulative effects of seismic sequences. The proposed approach models the progressive accumulation of structural damage and the resulting evolution of building vulnerability under repeated seismic loading. From a complex systems perspective, the methodology describes urban areas as collections of buildings whose vulnerability evolves through memory-dependent processes. Under this framework, the final damage scenario emerges from the cumulative effects of the entire seismic history rather than from the contribution of individual earthquakes considered in isolation. The study extends previous work by the authors, in which instrumentally derived macroseismic intensity maps were integrated with observed building damage data from the 2009 L’Aquila seismic sequence. The results demonstrated that the methodology could successfully reproduce the spatial distribution of observed damage when considering not only the mainshock but also all seismic events exceeding a selected magnitude threshold. In this contribution, new developments of the calibration procedure are presented, together with applications to the 2013 Garfagnana-Lunigiana and the 2016–2017 Central Italy seismic sequences. Through a comparative analysis of these case studies, the influence of different seismic sequence characteristics and building stock features on damage evolution is investigated. The results provide further insight into the capabilities and limitations of the proposed methodology, highlighting its potential as a tool for interpreting post-earthquake damage patterns and supporting seismic risk assessment and mitigation strategies.

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