This department focuses on various tasks related to the design, planning and developing safe environments compatible with earthquake risk levels and geological hazards. The research areas include:
- Investigation on potential geological hazardous areas for urban construction and studies on seismic-safe site selection for urban expansion;
- Determination of criteria and indices for urban and regional land-use allocation regarding urban seismic safety;
- Developing methodology for socio-economic losses calculations;
- Estimating damage and losses to urban fabrics according to probable scenarios cases and studying the optimal distribution of population, buildings and other urban components for mitigating the effects of earthquakes;
- Developing methodologies for seismic risk estimation, vulnerability assessment and retrofitting deteriorated urban fabrics;
- Devising seismic risk mitigation plans associated to studying different criteria of urban infrastructure development from disaster management point of view;
- Studying the effects of hazardous facilities damages in urban and rural areas and methods in monitoring, controlling, and mitigating their consequences;
- Investigating the effects of networks damages in urban infrastructure systems for disaster management;
- Study on emergency settlement, rehabilitation, and retrofitting associated to disaster hit zones.