Territorial Representation of a Vulnerability Associated with the Seveso Installations in a Nord Italian Case Study

The process industry is recognized as a source of hazards, both instantaneous and distributed over time and space. The industrial plants are no longer recognized as single independent units; they are, on the contrary, completing parts of a much larger system generated from the flows that stream from one to another, generating a macro system rooted in the territory. Particular relevance has received major risk installations or “Seveso” plants within this complex context. Since the implementation of the European Directive “Seveso” in Italy is mandatory for the municipalities which host a Seveso plant in their territory, instruments that include the criteria for the areas around these plants are required by the Urban and Land use planners. The goal was to represent the territorial vulnerability associated with the Seveso installations and impose binding areas around them that identify the areas of exclusion and observation established in the legislation. A Nord Italian region was used as a case study as part of the research activities of the Responsible Risk Resilience Centre of Turin Polytechnic (R3C) within its third cluster, called “Measuring Urban Resilience”. The minimum requirements for land and urban planning in areas in the vicinity of major risk installations, established in the Italian legislation, were used as a legal framework using an alternative place-based methodology. It was possible to geolocate the Seveso installations, and buffer zones were assigned for areas of exclusion and observation. In addition, the buffers were intersected with the national census sections to observe the number of inhabitants falling within these areas. Space-dependent analyses using the geographical information system (GIS) and the Geopandas python library were carried out, and thematic maps were generated at regional and local scales. The results contribute to increasing the awareness of the territorial vulnerability against major risk accidents and support resilience-based decision-making in designing technical measures.