The role of geophysics for urban environment characterization: the case study of Matera (southern Italy)

The global urbanization process, along with the environmental impacts it carries with it, requires the adoption of innovative programming strategies for the sustainable and efficient management of natural resources and to improve the resilience of cities to natural disasters. In this scenario where the acquisition of a deeper and as thorough as possible knowledge of the territory on the problems connected with the phenomena of hydrogeological instability and natural risk in general that can affect the inhabited centers pose new challenges both at the level of government and for the scientific community. Further, it is also important to organize and make these complex information easily accessible to stakeholders, i.e. administrators, planners and civil protection.

In the framework of two national projects, CLARA (CLoud plAtform and smart underground imaging for natural Risk Assessment) and SPOT (Development of a Platform for the provision of innovative services based on Earth Observation data), a systemic approach based on the integration of the latest enabling technologies (remote sensing and ground-based, active and passive, direct and indirect, multi-sources and multi-resolution) for the geo-physical characterization (seismic and electromagnetic) of the surface and near-surface and for the dynamic characterization of soil structure/infrastructure interactions was applied in the urban area of the city of Matera (southern Italy). By adopting the open-government and open-data paradigms, all the information collected have been eventually organized and shared in a web-gis along with geospatial data already available on different and independent web-services of local government authorities (region and municipality).