Resilient criteria for strategic road network

In order to accommodate current needs of urban contexts and to defi ne more resilient socialecological systems, the research identifi es the Emergency Plans as the most useful urban planning instruments to cope with these requests. Particularly, these instruments seem to be the most effective ones to outline renovated risk management measures in order to determinate new planning models for more resilient communities. Through them renewed conception and with special reference to seismic risk, there is a need to foresee both structural and functional intervention priorities on “strategic” territorial elements which are among current urban standards of greatest interest in planning today. Particularly, the paper identifi es the strategic road network (i.e. the road infrastructures of connection between essential services and emergency areas) as the key element of the backbone of a resilient community. In this context, the paper stresses the need to evaluate in a planning phase the safest strategic road according to different features: from the seismic vulnerability of buildings facing it, to the redundancy due to existing alternative roads in emergency conditions, to the presence of critical elements. Starting from these assumptions, future research will be directed towards resilient-based planning models (RDB), which can be considered as the next generation of performance-based design approaches (PBD) in order to evaluate better the interdependency among different elements of an urban system.