Construction Site Planning for the Reconstruction of a Historic Earthquake City: The Case Study of L’Aquila

Abstract

The earthquake that hit the city of L’Aquila on 6th April 2009 represents the first seismic event, after that of Messina in 1908, that interested such a wide and urbanized area as that of a county seat. Emerged problems after this occurrence, the mistakes that have been made and the set of adopted solutions, made L’Aquila to become a real “knowledge laboratory”.

In this context, the attention focuses on the complex issue of L’Aquila old town  reconstruction, often defined by the most important newspapers as “the biggest construction site of Europe”. Once have analyzed the procedures that the city council put in place, it is observed an absence of an instrument of planning through which to coordinate the construction sites simultaneously operating on the  area. The first to deal with this problem has been the municipality of Villa Sant’Angelo, that through the drafting of a “general construction site plan”, attempted to manage the critical issues about reconstruction. Starting from this cue, an elaboration of a general construction site plan is proposed for the “central axis” of L’Aquila old town. The goal is to plan construction site activities on the base of strategic choices followed from L’Aquila old town conditions after the earthquake, by referring to an urban scale instead of considering individually each single construction site. A work plan is obtained through the definition of requirements concerning the priority criteria for action, the old town viability, the logistics of construction sites and the rubble disposal. This plan  fosters a more functional and safer reconstruction, and a fairer use of public spaces from companies which execute private works.

Therefore, by using as starting point the implementation of the method in the case study of L’Aquila, it is here proposed an application solution concerning the management of reconstruction of Italian old towns hit by earthquakes.