Urban Fire

Find the 'Introduction', 'Method', and 'Literature Review' chapters in eBook format in the 'All' section above.

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensities, severities, and behaviours, and to the detriment of both environment and society. Nowhere is this felt more so than the wildland urban interface, which home to roughly 1/3 of the nation’s populous and 40% of its housing stock, is the fastest-growing land-use type in the conterminous United States. A place where fire-averse architectures meet increasingly fire-prone lands, loss of lives, properties, and livelihoods to a series of wildfire complexes of proportions unprecedented in living memory have rendered there an urgent need to reconsider the challenge of living with wildfire as a vital landscape process. The product of a transdisciplinary study which converged state-of-the-knowledge from fields as diverse as the fire, ecological, and wider Earth sciences; information, communication, computing, and related technologies, both digital and biological; evolutionary, smart and living materials, architectures, and urban systems; philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and policymaking, this thesis presents a new wildland urban interface paradigm modelled on the biochemistries, behaviours, and systems of fire-adapted flora and the fire regimes they form. Migrating biomimetics from the level of species to systems, relying not on generic notions of nature and its workings, nor assumptions more generally, but on rigorous interrogation of the interplay between biotic and abiotic processes from the molecular to landscape to planetary scale, and across both human and geological timescales, several original theoretical and technical architectural and urban concepts are discussed, together with their possible applications and implications both within and beyond the wildland urban interface. Integrating insights from local and global indigenous and ancient fire cultures, the findings conclude that not merely is a reconciliation of human and non-human systems at the interface of fire-prone wild and urban lands possible, but therein resides potent ecological, social, and technical potentialities that merit further research in the years ahead.

The way the built environment is shaped greatly affects its performance in providing a container of activities for its users. Being the second largest city in Indonesia after Jakarta, Surabaya has very high population and building density. Though the city is not prone to any natural disasters, the current population and building density make it prone to man-made disasters such as flooding and urban fires. This study was built on the idea that good environmental design can lower urban fire vulnerability. Built environment components were identified using Lynch’s urban design criteria while Cai and Wang provided basic guidance to the redesign of the built environment with their Safety-based Urban Design idea. The outcome of this endeavor was an environmental design approach that applied psychological safety, behavioral safety, defense for safety and safety against disaster values into the built environment’s paths, edges, nodes, districts and landmarks. This paper concludes that good ...

Most of the cities have urban quarters that reflect an aesthetic, historical and cultural sense of place and identity through history. Such quarters are generally blocked-up in the central areas and are often an integral part of the city with their structural features and identities. The rapid urbanization in developing countries reflects itself by the redistribution of population and consequently the redistribution of space, whose general trend is the fast growth on the periphery and the socioeconomic decline in central areas. This spatial transformation drive cities into a social and economic chaos, which increase various risks associated with disasters. As a result, fire incidents become an important urbanization problem, especially within the urban quarters, where historic buildings are concentrated. 

The ‘fire’ is defined as ‘disaster’ by laws in Turkey. Nevertheless, different than other disasters, fire is caused by human or technical failures dominantly. Therefore, fire causes and factors could be determined previously; in other words precaution and prevention efforts could be favorable for minimizing the effects of fire. The population and their attendance to economic and social activity, which also determine the distribution of activities within the built environment, take place in cities. This arrangement forms the basis for studying the distribution of other urban phenomena, so the fire problem. Thus, fire safety and risk control methods require knowledge of various factors including socioeconomic and built environment characteristics.

For improved urbanization and fire-safe built environments, alteration in urban areas, especially in historic urban quarters, should be controlled through planning process, and fire problem should be handled firstly at urban scale. This study hypothesis that fire risk varies with a number of factors and should be defined in urban context. Consequently, this study would try to define the ‘urban fire risk’ term, and its factors related with urban elements in general. Urban fire risk factors would be examined for historic urban quarter of Ankara where the Ankara Citadel and many timber historic buildings are located.  Main assumptions of this study are that the fire rate is differentiated not only according to structural factors, but also according to environmental and socioeconomic factors, and the risk management analysis could be used for defining areas containing more fire risks within the city.

An increasing number of fires are occurring with the rapid development of cities, resulting in increased risk for human beings and the environment. This study compares geographically weighted regression-based models, including geographically weighted regression (GWR) and geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR), which integrates spatial and temporal effects and global linear regression models (LM) for modeling fire risk at the city scale. The results show that the road density and the spatial distribution of enterprises have the strongest influences on fire risk, which implies that we should focus on areas where roads and enterprises are densely clustered. In addition, locations with a large number of enterprises have fewer fire ignition records, probably because of strict management and prevention measures. A changing number of significant variables across space indicate that heterogeneity mainly exists in the northern and eastern rural and suburban areas of Hefei city, where human-related facilities or road construction are only clustered in the city sub-centers. GTWR can capture small changes in the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the variables while GWR and LM cannot. An approach that integrates space and time enables us to better understand the dynamic changes in fire risk. Thus governments can use the results to manage fire safety at the city scale.

Only 20 of more than 80 medieval churches of Novgorod are extant nowadays. The city of Novgorod was struck by 91 fires from 1045 to 1433, and it seems that the inhabitants got used to reconstructing their wooden houses frequently. Most of the churches were erected in early times with wood, later burned down and were rebuilt with wood, sometimes seven or more times over the years. Later the builders changed their strategy and organized far more expensive but also more fire–resisting stone material. The churches were erected in stone and thus provided far more security in the case of a fire. Novgorod was the central collecting point for dangerous forest products such as furs, honey and beeswax. These products were also stored inside the stone churches. In case of a fire these valuables attracted plunderers. The church buildings themselves were threatened by lightning and the open fire of candles used for Christian ceremonies. Nevertheless stone churches were more secure than their wooden counterparts. In the time period up to 1480 more than 70 of 80 churches were replaced by stone buildings.

ABSTRACT The management, prevention and mitigation of urban risks are assumed as priority actions within the framework of any rehabilitation and requalification process at the urban scale, particularly in the case of old city centers. In the most specific domain of urban safety, seismic and fire risk, which can cause serious consequences, are part of the collective memory of several communities and must be inevitably highlighted. The severity of the resulting damages is a sufficient reason to strongly value prevention, planning and mitigation strategies, limiting their consequences and guaranteeing permanent improvement actions. Bearing in mind the exposed, and in the scope of a research work carried out, a new urban fire risk assessment methodology was developed and applied to the old city center of Seixal. This simplified methodology is based on pre-established method called A.R.I.C.A. Over 500 buildings were assessed using this methodology, and the results were spatially analyzed using an integrated Geographical Information System tool (GIS). It is worth noting that the integration of the risk results into a GIS platform is a valuable step towards the risk mitigation at a urban scale, allowing city councils or regional authorities to plan interventions on the basis of a global spatial view of the site under analysis, leading to more accurate and comprehensive risk mitigation strategies that support the requirements of safety and emergency planning in case of urban fire.

This article examines urban fire narratives in Britain from the Reformation to the end of the seventeenth century. Through shared biblical references, pulpiteers, balladeers and layfolk connected accounts geographically, historically and providentially. Concomitant to this, is that descriptions of the most famous of infernos, the Great Fire of London in 1666, were actually a recycled continuation of – rather than a novel departure from – previous urban fire accounts.  Authors used the same biblical excerpts to indicate a host of potential scapegoats, rail against Sabbath–breaking, and encourage responses of national compunction.