The principle of sustainability should be strictly connected with safety, since both aim to conserve resources: in the case of sustainability, the resources are typically thought of as environmental, while in the case of safety, the resources are basically human. In spite of this common ground, discussions on sustainability usually give insufficient attention to safety. In the last years the EU has made large investments to increase the energy efficiency of the existing building stock, paving the way for a low-carbon future; however, less effort has been made to enhance its seismic resilience. Therefore, the safety and, consequently, the sustainability of towns situated in earthquake-prone countries remain inadequate. In such countries, energy renovation actions should be combined with seismic retrofitting. However, a number of barriers considerably limit the real possibility of extensively undertaking combined retrofit actions, especially for multi-owner housing and high-rise buildings. These barriers are of different kinds: technical (e.g., unfeasibility and/or ineffectiveness of conventional retrofit solutions), financial (e.g., high renovation costs, insufficient incentives/subsidies), organizational (e.g., occupants’ disruption and relocation, renovation consensus by condominium ownerships), and cultural/social (insufficient information and skills, lack of adequate policy measures for promoting renovation actions). This book aims to overcome these barriers and to bridge the gap between sustainability and safety, so to conserve both human and environmental resources.

This book addresses key issues across the field of sustainable urban planning, and provides a unique reference tool for planners, engineers, architects, public administrators, and other experts. The evolution of cities and communities is giving rise to pressing energy and environmental problems that demand concrete solutions. In this context, urban planning is inevitably a complex activity that requires a sound analytical interpretation of ongoing developments, multidisciplinary analysis of the available tools and technologies, appropriate political management, and the ability to monitor progress objectively in order to verify the effectiveness of the policies implemented. This book is exceptional in both the breadth of its coverage and its focus on the interactions between different elements. Individual sections focus on strategies and tools for green planning, energy efficiency and sustainability in city planning, sustainable mobility, rating systems, and the smart city approach to improving urban-scale sustainability. The authors draw on their extensive practical experience to provide operational content supplementing the theoretical and methodological elements covered in the text, and each section features informative case studies.

This book encompasses the most challenging topics in earthquake engineering and seismology aiming at seismic risk reduction and reveals the outstanding progresses made in Europe in the past four years. Earthquakes pose a significant threat to countries around the world. But, equipped with the right knowledge and tools, engineers and seismologists can support policy and decision makers and building officials in creating a safer future for all of us. In this paradigm, the Third European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (3ECEES) is organized in Bucharest (Romania) in September 2022 by the Romanian Association for Earthquake Engineering, Technical University of Civil Engineering of Bucharest and National Institute for Earth Physics. This outstanding scientific event is the third in a series started in 2006 in Geneva, Switzerland and continued in 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. The papers included in this book are written by the most prominent contemporary European scholars in the two-folded fields of 3ECEES. The Distinguished Nicholas Ambraseys, along with 28 invited lectures providing the best knowledge in the fields of earthquake engineering and seismology, are shared with the general readership of this book. The book is organized in three parts, as follows: (1) Seismicity, engineering seismology and seismic hazard, (2) Seismic risk assessment and mitigation, and (3) Structural earthquake engineering. The 29 contributed papers for this book are shared among these three parts almost equally. Chapter “The Challenge of the Integrated Seismic Strengthening and Environmental Upgrading of Existing Buildings” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

eWork and eBusiness in Architecture, Engineering and Construction 2018 collects the papers presented at the 12th European Conference on Product and Process Modelling (ECPPM 2018, Copenhagen, 12-14 September 2018). The contributions cover complementary thematic areas that hold great promise towards the advancement of research and technological development in the modelling of complex engineering systems, encompassing a substantial number of high quality contributions on a large spectrum of topics pertaining to ICT deployment instances in AEC/FM, including: • Information and Knowledge Management • Construction Management • Description Logics and Ontology Application in AEC • Risk Management • 5D/nD Modelling, Simulation and Augmented Reality • Infrastructure Condition Assessment • Standardization of Data Structures • Regulatory and Legal Aspects • Multi-Model and distributed Data Management • System Identification • Industrilized Production, Smart Products and Services • Interoperability • Smart Cities • Sustainable Buildings and Urban Environments • Collaboration and Teamwork • BIM Implementation and Deployment • Building Performance Simulation • Intelligent Catalogues and Services eWork and eBusiness in Architecture, Engineering and Construction 2018 represents a rich and comprehensive resource for academics and researchers working in the interdisciplinary areas of information technology applications in architecture, engineering and construction. In the last two decades, the biennial ECPPM (European Conference on Product and Process Modelling) conference series, as the oldest BIM conference, has provided a unique platform for the presentation and discussion of the most recent advances with regard to the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) applications in the AEC/FM (Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facilities Management) domains.

The seven volumes LNCS 12249-12255 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2020, held in Cagliari, Italy, in July 2020. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was organized in an online event. Computational Science is the main pillar of most of the present research, industrial and commercial applications, and plays a unique role in exploiting ICT innovative technologies. The 466 full papers and 32 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 1450 submissions. Apart from the general track, ICCSA 2020 also include 52 workshops, in various areas of computational sciences, ranging from computational science technologies, to specific areas of computational sciences, such as software engineering, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence, blockchain technologies, and of applications in many fields.

Containing research on sustainable urban redevelopment presented at the latest in a biennial series organised by the Wessex Institute of Technology, this book addresses an area of growing interest. The conference series was first held in 2000. These proceedings are split into two volumes. Urban areas produce a series of environmental challenges arising from the consumption of natural resources and the consequent generation of waste and pollution, contributing to the development of social and economic imbalances. All these problems, which continue to grow in our society, require the development of new solutions. Topics include: Volume I – Urban Strategies; Eco-town Planning; Planning, development and management; Planning, development and management for urban conservation and regeneration; Case studies; Landscape planning and design; Environmental management; Intelligent environments and emerging technologies. Volume II – Sustainable energy and the city; Waterfront developments; The community and the city; Quality of life; Cultural heritage issues; Transportation; Planning for risk; Planning for risk; Transport models in emergency conditions; Industrial wastes as raw materials; Waste management; Safety and security; The city heritage.

Optimization is considered as a decision-making process for getting the most out of available resources for the best attainable results. Many real-world problems are multi-objective or multi-attribute problems that naturally involve several competing objectives that need to be optimized simultaneously, while respecting some constraints or involving selection among feasible discrete alternatives. In this Reprint of the Special Issue, 19 research papers co-authored by 88 researchers from 14 different countries explore aspects of multi-objective or multi-attribute modeling and optimization in crisp or uncertain environments by suggesting multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) and multi-objective decision-making (MODM) approaches. The papers elaborate upon the approaches of state-of-the-art case studies in selected areas of applications related to sustainable development decision aiding in engineering and management, including construction, transportation, infrastructure development, production, and organization management.

This book examines reconstruction and resilience of historic cities and societies from multiple disciplinary and complementary perspectives and, by doing so, it helps researchers and practitioners alike, among them reconstruction managers, urban governance and professionals. The book builds on carefully selected and updated papers accepted for the 2019 Silk Cities international conference on ‘reconstruction, recovery and resilience of historic cities and societies’, the third Silk Cities conference held in L’Aquila, Italy, 10-12 July 2019, working with University of L’Aquila and UCL. This multi-scale, and multidisciplinary book offers cross-sectoral and complimentary voices from multiple stakeholders, including academia, urban governance, NGOs and local populations. It examines post-disaster reconstruction strategies and case studies from Europe, Asia and Latin America that provide a valuable collection for anyone who would like to get a global overview on the subject matter. It thereby enables a deeper understanding of challenges, opportunities and approaches in dealing with historic cities facing disasters at various geographical scales. Additionally, it brings together historical approaches to the reconstruction of historical cities and those of more recent times. Thus, it can be used as a reference book for global understanding of the subject matter.

The ten-volume set LNCS 12949 – 12958 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2021, which was held in Cagliari, Italy, during September 13 – 16, 2021. The event was organized in a hybrid mode due to the Covid-19 pandemic.The 466 full and 18 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 1588 submissions. The books cover such topics as multicore architectures, blockchain, mobile and wireless security, sensor networks, open source software, collaborative and social computing systems and tools, cryptography, applied mathematics human computer interaction, software design engineering, and others. Part IV of the set includes the papers on Urban and Regional Planning and the proceedings of the following workshops: ​International Workshop on Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers: Technologies and Applications (BDLTA 2021); International Workshop on Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAM 2021); International Workshop on Computational and Applied Statistics (CAS 2021); International Workshop on Computerized Evaluation of Economic Activities: Urban Spaces (CEEA 2021).The chapters "Automated Housing Price Valuation and Spatial Data", "Spatial Automated Valuation Model (sAVM) – From the Notion of Space to the Design of an Evaluation Tool", and "A MCDA/GIS-Based Approach for Evaluating Accessibility to Health Facilities" are published open access under a CC BY license (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License).