# Measuring the Seismic Resilience of Housing Systems in Italy
## 5 Conclusions  
In this article, a framework to roughly quantify the seismic resilience of communities on a national/sub-national scale is proposed. It uses probabilistic risk analysis to estimate the robustness of cities against possible earthquakes by focusing on housing systems and neglecting the functional interdependencies of urban sub-systems. The inaccuracy of this approximation is due to the large spatial scale considered in this study and the key role of residential buildings in Italian territories, especially in the southern regions. The resilience measurements are then obtained through the time integration of an empirical recovery function considering different control times. Recovery function is evaluated at an urban level according to the seismic robustness of housing systems for different return periods. This function describes the housing functionality recovery over time of a city and is defined on the basis of the empirical formulations suggested by [PERSON] et al. [45] to generalize the housing recovery observed by [PERSON] et al. [44] after the 2012 Northern Italy Earthquake. It is able to combine the drop in functionality linked to the seismic risk of the exposed assets with the emergency management and recovery phases, as well as the integration and social cohesion of communities during these phases. In this way, the different dimensions of resilience may be more easily analyzed according to recent findings on Italian reconstruction processes. The proposed framework is applied to the housing systems of all municipalities in five regions of southern Italy to provide resilience measurements for a return period of 100, 250 and 500 years, and a control time of 12, 24, 36 and 60 months. These measurements may help policymakers in comparing and understanding the recovery capacities of the analyzed municipalities in order to foster good practices and policies in risk governance and management at a local, regional and interregional level. Notwithstanding the developed work is based on one of the most recent post-disaster reconstruction processes in Italy, the calculated resilience measurements could be optimistic when used to quantify the resilience of poor communities. This is due to the fact that they refer to productive realities in which it is reasonable to foresee a great boost to the local economy by the investments of national and multinational companies, as well as small- and medium-sized businesses. Such investments have brought greater integration and social cohesion during the emergency management and recovery phases, but they could not occur in the poor communities of many cities in southern Italy, where the willingness to pay for seismic retrofitting of their properties may also be very low [60]. In fact, in these communities, depopulation phenomena already occur in peacetime and greater risks of abandonment may arise in the aftermath of a disastrous earthquake. The different seismic response of Italian communities is linked to the territorial differences in terms of production system, labor market, corporate financing and other factors, such as infrastructure and public services, socio-economic conditions, quality of institutional context and public administration, and diffusion of organized crime. Consequently, specific recovery functions could be estimated to better reproduce the reconstruction process of poor communities. In this direction, the authors are working to fine-tune more accurate resilience measurements for vulnerable communities. Although the proposal may be intended as a simple and pragmatic way to analyze the community's resilience to Italian seismic events, it could easily beimplemented in other earthquake-prone countries in order to carry out preliminary resilience assessments and then make comparisons and initial choices. However, more robust resilience assessments may be conducted in such countries by applying specific data and modifications to the recovery function.