Co-Creating GIS-Based Dashboards to Democratize Knowledge on Urban Resilience Strategies: Experience with Camerino Municipality

Abstract

Natural hazards are increasingly threatening our communities; hence it is imperative to provide communities with reliable information on possible impacts of such disasters, and on resilience measures that can be adopted to recover from disasters. To increase the engagement of various stakeholders in decision-making processes related to resilience to natural hazards, problem-specific information needs to be presented to them in a language understandable to non-experts in the field. To this end, this paper illustrates experimentation with low-code platforms for fast digitalization of resilience reports, incorporating the perspectives of various stakeholders in the analysis, thus making informed decision-making practicable. We present a co-creation-based approach to develop GIS-based user-friendly dashboards in support to the identification of resilience strategies against natural hazards; this approach has been developed within the framework of the European project ARCH. Urban areas are regarded as complex social-ecological systems whose various dimensions should be considered in this resilience endeavor, during all phases of the Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation cycle. The work presented in this paper specifically targets the possible impacts and risks that might affect the cultural heritage subsystems of our cities, generally underrepresented in the international literature related to urban resilience assessment. We describe how we applied our approach to the Camerino municipality, a historic Italian town exposed to seismic risk, which was struck by a severe earthquake sequence in 2016–2017 and discuss the results of our experience.

Keywords

• urban resilience
• cultural heritage
• knowledge representation
• geographic information system
• seismic risk
• climate change