Grazia Di Giovanni (p), Lorenzo Chelleri

Melanie Bakema

See extended abstract

Giulio Breglia (p), Alessandra Faggian, Giulia Urso

Grazia Di Giovanni

Housing is one of the most important issues after a natural disaster. Even considering the strong State aid, common in these circumstances, the real estate morphology in the years after catastrophic events changes quite dramatically. However, these dramatic changes are often not captured by a simple measure such as house prices, either in the form of rents or sale prices. Even in a situation where we do not observe any change in the average house prices, the quality and composition of the housing market are greatly impacted by the process of destruction and reconstruction following an earthquake.

The aim of the paper is to look at the changes in the characteristics of the housing market in the case of the city of L’Aquila in Italy, which was severely hit by the earthquake of April 2009. Following the earthquake, there was an outflow of money invested in the reconstruction process. Four billion euros were spent just for private buildings and another four are on their way. The combination of the two external shocks represented by the earthquake first and the reconstruction subsidies second, should have created a discontinuity in the house price time series. However, surprisingly, the trend in L’Aquila was in line with similar cities not affected by disasters and with the overall national housing market cycle.
This surprising pattern requires a deeper analysis of the underlying features of the L’Aquila housing market. Starting from the Zabel work [Zabel, J. (2015)], this paper would therefore apply an hedonic house price model for the market of L’Aquila on all the housing market transactions for the period 2014-2016. The data on individual transactions, which include household and building characteristics, will be combined with data on the reconstruction process of every single house from the public dataset “opendataricostruzione.gssi.it” and data on territorial amenities and housing market from Istat, OECD, Bank of Italy and Scenari Immobiliari.
Following the hedonic model approach, the final house price will be a function of three vectors: house characteristic, territorial amenities and individual preferences. In the “augmented” model, other factors linked to the earthquake will also be considered, including migration rates, seismic classification of buidlings and new neighbourhood settlements. Especially the seismic classification of buildings is an important factor to control for in a city like L’Aquila. Different individuals might have a different willingness to pay for different levels of seismic preparedness of houses.

Melanie Bakema (p), Constanza Parra, Philip McCann

Giulio Breglia

A disaster is a result of combined natural and social factors and impacts both material and immaterial elements of societies. They are regarded as social constructs and are created when a society is not able to absorb a natural hazard because of their socio-economic vulnerabilities and other institutional factors (Wisner et al., 2004). Although this ‘social construction’ of disasters is usually assumed to occur ‘above the ground’, in this paper we explore a deeper layer to the social construction of disasters ‘below the ground’ as well. In particular, we explore the dynamic governance processes in cases of both nature- and human-induced disasters. Although disasters often completely overwhelm existing institutions and societies and they are expected to increase in frequency and duration mostly because of climate change (Stewart and Donovan, 2008), post-disaster contexts also offer the possibility to use the disaster event and to ‘build- back’ more resilient; i.e. ‘bounce-forward’ towards a more resilient and sustainable situation (Manyena et al., 2011). With this, we aim to contribute to both a better understanding of the social factors that lead to the construction of disasters, and also to the ways in which we can improve governance systems for dealing with disasters. We explore the governance structures of dealing with various kinds of nature- and human-induced disasters and look at the roles and responsibilities of the public, private and civil society institutions. We investigate the processes through which societies affected by disasters aim to transition to more resilient situations in three cases: 1) the case of Christchurch, New Zealand, after the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011; 2) the case of Chiloé, Chile, after the aquacultural crisis of Infectious Salmon Anemia in 2007 and 2008; 3) the case of Groningen in The Netherlands, an area that is coping with earthquakes caused by gas extraction. The in-depth findings, based on interviews with actors from a wide variety of roles on different levels, led to valuable insights on collaborative processes in governance in extreme contexts.