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Abstract. Planning for post-disaster accessibility is essential for the provision of emergency and other services to protect life and property in impacted areas. Such planning is particularly important in congested historic districts where narrow streets and at-risk structures are more common and may even prevail. Indeed, a standard method of measuring accessibility, through the use of isochrones, may be particularly inappropriate in these congested historic areas. Bucharest, Romania, is a city with a core of historic buildings and narrow streets. Furthermore, Bucharest ranks second only to Istanbul among large European cities in terms of its seismic risk. This paper provides an accessibility simulation for central Bucharest using mapping and geographic information system (GIS) technologies. It hypothesizes that all buildings in the risk 1 class would collapse in an earthquake of a similar magnitude to those of 1940 and 1977. The authors then simulate accessibility impacts in the historic centre of Bucharest, such as the isolation of certain areas and blockages of some street sections. In this simulation, accessibility will be substantially compromised by anticipated and extensive building collapse. Therefore, policy makers and planners need to fully understand and incorporate the serious implications of this compromised accessibility when planning emergency services and disaster recovery responses.

The application of geographical information systems (GIS) to the assessment of accessibility to hospitals has been investigated for an important growth pole in SouthEast Europe, respectively Bucharest and its metropolitan area. The calculation of accessibility at an intra-regional level is essential, taking into consideration the major role as a capital city, as well as the magnitude of the influence exercised over its hinterland. The territorial dynamics, characterizing a metropolis and also the attraction on a constant number of people, may raise a number of issues such as overcrowding of the main access roads into the city, the pressure put on the public transportation network, the rise of the number of personal cars, which is linked to the longer time needed to travel to various services areas.

The goal of the present study is to analyze the complex economic processes within emerging territorial systems, developed around big cities. Economic ventures concentrated inside these urban clusters in a short span of time, and they registered a spectacular evolution, compared to the neighboring areas. Intensification of the linkages between cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants in Romania and the surrounding areas led to the individualization of territorial systems apart, with a spectacular evolution of economic-social processes, which turn those systems into the most dynamic territorial structures. The present study means to identify the causes of those complex processes within emerging territorial systems, the manner of functional organization of the space, and the causes that determine the spectacular evolution of the economic processes within emerging systems.

Abstract. Planning for post-disaster accessibility is essential for the provision of emergency and other services to protect life and property in impacted areas. Such planning is particularly important in congested historic districts where narrow streets and at-risk structures are more common and may even prevail. Indeed, a standard method of measuring accessibility, through the use of isochrones, may be particularly inappropriate in these congested historic areas. Bucharest, Romania, is a city with a core of historic buildings and narrow streets. Furthermore, Bucharest ranks second only to Istanbul among large European cities in terms of its seismic risk. This paper provides an accessibility simulation for central Bucharest using mapping and GIS technologies. It hypothesizes that all buildings in the Risk 1 class would collapse in an earthquake of a similar magnitude to those of 1940 and 1977. The authors then simulate accessibility impacts in the historic center of Bucharest, such as the isolation of certain areas, and blockages of some street sections. In this simulation, accessibility will be substantially compromised by anticipated and extensive building collapse. Therefore, policy makers and planners need to fully understand and incorporate the serious implications of this compromised accessibility when planning emergency services and disaster recovery responses.