COVID-19 has forced city governments to reconsider the relationship between mobility, urban space and health in order to ensure physical distancing while meeting the travel needs of inhabitants. Therefore, cities around the world are already involved in the transformation of mobility through new models of sustainable transport. The World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on mobility during the COVID outbreak are mostly directed at creating more spaces for cyclists and pedestrians, especially in densely populated urban areas, thus avoiding the overloading of public transport and the use of private cars. Through the analysis of the programs set up by the 10 main Italian metropolitan cities, chosen as a case study, this research evaluates the response implemented by local governments in order to transform urban environments in one of the world’s most pandemic-affected countries in detail. Starting from the current mobility model, this paper focuses on local government policies concerning post-COVID sustainable mobility to understand policies, approaches and measures in depth, as well as the effectiveness of the ongoing actions in shaping future urban mobility. From the research, an almost homogeneous awareness among policy makers and planners emerges concerning the need to rethink urban spaces and mobility, to make up for lost time and to start a green revolution that is aimed at quickly decarbonizing urban transport and enhancing cycling and walking through the city.

In order to estimate the seismic vulnerability of a densely populated urban area, it would in principle be necessary to evaluate the dynamic behaviour of individual and aggregate buildings. These detailed seismic analyses, however, are extremely cost-intensive and require great processing time and expertise judgment. The aim of the present study is to propose a new methodology able to combine information and tools coming from different scientific fields in order to reproduce the effects of a seismic input in urban areas with known geological features and to estimate the entity of the damages caused on existing buildings. In particular, we present a new software called ABES (Agent-Based Earthquake Simulator), based on a Self-Organized Criticality framework, which allows to evaluate the effects of a sequence of seismic events on a certain large urban area during a given interval of time. The integration of Geographic Information System (GIS) data sets, concerning both geological and urban information about the territory of Avola (Italy), allows performing a parametric study of these effects on a real context as a case study. The proposed new approach could be very useful in estimating the seismic vulnerability and defining planning strategies for seismic risk reduction in large urban areas