Journal articles on the topic 'Vulnerabilità edifici'

Heritage monuments are religious, historical, strategic, or civil edifices and could be deteriorated or even damaged due to their exposure to natural and anthropogenic hazards. The Roman Edifice with Mosaic (II-IV A.D.), the largest civil edifice (2040 m2) in Eastern Europe, is an ancient civil edifice built on the steep cliff in the western part of the Black Sea, Constanța, Romania, and is exposed to geomorphological and hydrogeological processes, which are affected by degradation. The main objective of this paper is to assess the current state of this ancient historical site in relation to environmental instability and offer scientific support for the rehabilitation process through interdisciplinary and non-destructive methods. Geophysical methods had been applied to comparatively analyze the spatial variations and flows of groundwater around the Roman Edifice with Mosaic in 2008 and 2019. Geomorphological hazards had already been inventoried and mapped. The results emphasize the state of degradation of the Roman mosaic pavement and ancient walls, mainly through high variations in the deposits’ moisture due to poor maintenance, which caused suffosion, and slip processes, bringing the mosaic into a high vulnerability range. The vulnerability map of the Roman Edifice with Mosaic environment is a necessary tool for continuously improving risk management because it clearly emphasizes the sectors that still have hazards.

El territorio de Ecuador está expuesto a riesgo sísmico por su ubicación en la zona volcánica norte de la Cordillera de Los Andes, donde ocurren procesos tectónicos por los efectos de la subducción de la placa de Nazca bajo la placa Sudamericana. El riesgo sísmico se debe a tres factores: la amenaza sísmica, exposición y vulnerabilidad. La Universidad Estatal de Bolívar está ubicada en la región sierra ecuatoriana, donde en los últimos años son más frecuentes los sucesos sísmicos, durante el evento de 2016 se visibilizaron daños parciales a la institución del campus matriz. La presente investigación surge con la finalidad de analizar la vulnerabilidad ante sismos del edificio en que radica la Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud y del Ser Humano, con el propósito de determinar y ponderar las características actuales de la edificación e identificar el nivel de vulnerabilidad sísmica del mismo. Se realiza una investigación de campo en la que se aplica la ficha de la metodología aprobada por la Secretaria Nacional de Gestión de Riesgos de Ecuador para evaluación sísmica y verificación del nivel de vulnerabilidad física, se utiliza además el esclerómetro que aporta información respecto a la resistencia de la infraestructura. El nivel de vulnerabilidad de los factores físicos del edificio resulta de 36,6 puntos correspondiendo a un índice de vulnerabilidad sísmica medio; de los elementos estructurales estudiados se resume que el edificio tiene un desempeño aceptable pudiendo resistir ante la demanda de un evento sísmico.

Resumen En España, donde existen más de 18 millones de hogares según el último censo del Instituto Nacional de Estadística en 2011, alrededor del 8% de la población reside en viviendas de alquiler social. Del parque de viviendas español, más de la mitad de los edificios se construyeron antes de 1980 y alrededor del 35% entre 1981 y 2006, año en que fue implantado el Código Técnico de la Edificación. Asimismo, más del 80% de los certificados energéticos de edificios existentes registrados hasta julio de 2015, obtiene una calificación E o inferior en términos de emisiones de CO2. Para mejorar estos resultados, la Unión Europea tiene como objetivo alcanzar una tasa de rehabilitación de edificios privados del 2,5% anual, mejorando la eficiencia energética y ampliando la vida útil del parque edificatorio. Sin embargo, los CEEE únicamente representan parte de la etapa de uso, dejando atrás otras, como la de producción, cuyo impacto puede representar un cuarto de las emisiones de CO2 del edificio a lo largo de su ciclo de vida. Para desarrollar una rehabilitación óptima, se propone evaluar la sostenibilidad de los proyectos de rehabilitación incluyendo las etapas de producción, construcción, uso y fin de vida y considerando el impacto medioambiental y económico, así como aspectos sociales relativos a las características de la vivienda social. Este artículo analiza los impactos medioambientales de diferentes soluciones de rehabilitación en vivienda social, tomando como caso de estudio un edificio de vivienda social en Zaragoza. El edificio antes de la rehabilitación supone casi 50 kgCO2-eq/m2año, donde el 60% corresponden al consumo eléctrico durante la fase de uso del edificio. En el estudio también se incluye la variable de confort térmico en situaciones de vulnerabilidad energética. Abstract In Spain, where there are more than 18 million households according to the last census of the National Institute of Statistics in 2011, around 8% of the population lives in social rental housing. Of the Spanish housing stock, more than half of the buildings were built before 1980 and around 35% between 1981 and 2006, the year in which the Technical Building Code was implemented. Likewise, more than 80% of the energy certificates of existing buildings registered until July 2015, obtain an E rating or lower in terms of CO2 emissions. To improve these results, the European Union aims to achieve a private buildings rehabilitation rate of 2.5% per year, improving energy efficiency and extending the useful life of the building park. However, CEEEs only represent part of the use stage, leaving behind others, such as production, whose impact can represent a quarter of the building's CO2 emissions throughout its life cycle. To develop an optimal rehabilitation, it is proposed to evaluate the sustainability of the rehabilitation projects including the stages of production, construction, use and end of life and considering the environmental and economic impact, as well as social aspects related to the characteristics of social housing. This article analyzes the environmental impacts of different rehabilitation solutions in social housing, taking as a case study a social housing building in Zaragoza. The building before the rehabilitation supposes almost 50 kgCO2-eq / m2año, where 60% correspond to the electrical consumption during the phase of use of the building. The study also includes the thermal comfort variable in situations of energy vulnerability.

As the museum building serves a critical role in preventive conservation, its maintenance and repair represent important measures to ensure the safekeeping of cultural heritage. Construction projects can be key to the long-term preservation of the building, and in turn advance the need for collection care, but the construction process itself introduces risk from a variety of sources. Moreover, safety concerns related to building projects often restrict access to portions of the building, complicating the work of museum professionals who have a responsibility for preserving collection material but may not be directly involved in day-to-day construction activities. What are the problems of most potential destruction to building contents, and where can planning make a world of difference in reducing risk? This presentation presents an overview of the construction process, using a critical path schedule as an introduction for people who’ve not participated in a capital project. Discussion will identify how risk changes according to the phase of construction, where work increases the vulnerability of collection material and what measures can be taken early in a project to manage these factors. The presenters will focus on fire protection during construction, referencing published reports about incidents of damage and their causes, then connecting this data to challenges unique to museum projects. Budgets and museum professionals’ time should be directed toward mitigating damage based on a risk assessment built upon data that exists from multiple sources within the construction industry.

O presente estudo examina a partir de Emmanuel Levinas o sujeito sem identidade. Segundo o pensador, o sujeito da filosofia ocidental foi constituído a partir do ego. A racionalidade apoderou-se desse conceito e assim arquitetou o edifício filosófico. Só que esse conceito anula completamente a subjetividade. Porque a ditadura da razão não possibilita pensar de outro modo, pensar diferente. Diante disso, Levinas sustenta a tese do sem identidade, ou seja, o indivíduo sem identidade. O ponto central será a subjetividade, no entanto, não a subjetividade como concebe a filosofia ocidental. A subjetividade parte da sensibilidade do sujeito, sensibilidade que é aproximação, exposição ao outro. Aproximação que é vulnerabilidade e responsabilidade infinita para com o outro.Abstract: Following Emmanuel Levinas, this study examines the subject without identity. According to the thinker, in Western philosophy, the subject has been built upon the ego. The rationality took hold of this concept and devised the philosophical edifice accordingly. However, this concept completely nullifies subjectivity, since the dictatorship of reason does not allow for a different way of thinking. In view of this, Levinas maintains the thesis of the self with no identity, that is, the individual without identity. The focus will be on subjectivity, although conceived differently than in Western philosophy. Subjectivity here derives from the subjectÊs sensitivity, which is approach to the other and exposure to the other, and therefore vulnerability and infinite responsibility towards others.

A study conducted in Central America in 2003 shows that in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch noticeable progress was made in introducing new legislation for disaster management, understood as covering the whole cycle from prevention, preparedness and relief, to reconstruction. The new legislation includes civil defence or disaster management laws and regulations to improve their effectiveness in responding to the threat of natural disasters. A similar situation can be observed in other countries like Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The study looks into existing urban and municipal laws, regulations and planning guidelines to assess the extent to which they respond to vulnerability reduction criteria. This paper focuses on aspects of prevention and risk reduction. An attempt was made to look into the complementarities and gaps between the two sets of regulations for disaster management and for municipal/urban management. It is found that despite the many elements of good practice included in them, the links between these instruments are weak or absent on issues ranging from planning to the actual supervision of interventions on the built environment. Thus, the main elements of the edifice were there, but they did not constitute a solid, interconnected, structure, therefore, bound to fail under the loads imposed by rapid urbanisation, speculation, emergencies and weak governance structures. Institutions are often left to fend themselves in discharging their tasks. Without a coherent normative framework, and the capacity to apply it, their work is primarily driven by institutional initiative, leading to problems of underperformance, overlaps, gaps, and non-constructive competition. Thus, the institutional setup and normative framework become important factors in increasing vulnerability, as real as a building with the wrong foundations. The article reviews the mentioned aspects drawing from the experience in Central America, Cuba and Dominican Republic.

The Palace of the Dey at Algiers is located inside the Citadel of Algiers which was built in the 16th century (1516) by ‘Arrudj (Barbarous). The citadel is located at the higher part of the city and was the first military building at that time. The citadel was the janissary barracks and initially contained a powder keg, a walk, Janissaries residence places and their mosque. Starting from the 18th century appear new constructive strata. In 1716 some part of this military edifice was destroyed by an earthquake. In 1783 the Spanish bombarded Algiers and a bomb fell into the first storey of the palace. The architectural transformations took place in 1817 when the Dey ‘Ali Khūdja lived at the janissary’s barracks. Thereafter and during 12 years several buildings were added to this whole defensive structure as the second and the third floors of the palace, the Dey’s mosque, the bath, the Bey’s palace and the winter garden. During the French colonization, the palace undergoes other transformations as the destruction of most of the rampart of the city contiguous to the palace which caused its instability and which until today accentuates its vulnerability. The lack of maintains, the abandonment and the bad restoration which took place during the 20th century increased this vulnerability. This work based on a visual screening will present the various aspects of vulnerability due to static weaknesses of the angles and absence of wind-bracing of this palace.

Sexual violence remains a persistent scourge of war. The use of sexual violence against men in armed conflict, however, remains underresearched and is often sidelined. As an explanation, this interdisciplinary article situates the issue of sexual violence against men within a new analytical framework. It does so through a focus on the core subtext which this violence reveals—the vulnerability of the penis. Highlighting critical disconnects between what the penis is and what it is constructed as being, it argues that the vulnerable penis destabilizes the edifice of phallocentric masculinity, and hence it has wider security implications. Conflict-related sexual violence has increasingly been securitized within the framework of human security. The concept of human security, however, is deeply gendered and often excludes male victims of sexual violence. This gendering, in turn, reflects a broader gendered relationship between sexual violence and security. Sexual violence against women manifests and reaffirms their long-recognized vulnerability in war. Sexual violence against men, in contrast, exposes the vulnerability of the penis and thus represents a deeper security threat. Fundamentally, preserving the integrity and power of the phallus is critical to the security and integrity of phallocentric masculinity and thus to maintaining a systemic stability that is crucial in situations of war and armed conflict.

This paper focuses on the Murena Palace in Perugia, part of an architectural complex designed by Luigi Vanvitelli and completed by Carlo Murena in the 18th century. In the context of the seismic vulnerability assessment of this masonry building, the safety of a construction modulus, which gathers several peculiar features identified within the edifice, is analyzed by means of an integrated architectural-structural approach. This construction modulus, that will be called Vanvitelli’s Modulus, is characterized by an intrinsic structural asymmetry with clusters of rooms with masonry vaults, combining different heights, where load bearing walls are standing on top of the vaults. Given these peculiarities, this construction modulus has to be analyzed as a sub-structure with regards to the seismic vulnerability. To this purpose, experimental tests, in particular videoendoscopies and structural monitoring, were conducted to identify geometrical features of walls and vaults, mechanical characteristic of materials and the actual damage condition. From an accurate survey, an innovative parametric approach has been proposed to build the geometrical model of the construction modulus. This has been used, by FEM (finite element method), to perform a structural analysis whose results have been checked by comparison with the actual damage patterns. The proposed integrated architectural-structural approach permits a deeper comprehension of the structural principles that characterize Vanvitelli’s construction modulus and to estimate its seismic vulnerability.

1535 Background: The efficacy and benefit/risk ratio of organized nationwide cancer screening programs rely on the age range of eligible average-risk populations. We studied the characteristics of off-target populations who underwent opportunistic screening for colorectal (CRC), breast (BC) or cervical (CC) cancer, ≤5y prior to the recommended age. Methods: The French nationwide observational survey, EDIFICE 6, was conducted online (June 26-July 28, 2017) on a core sample of 12 046 individuals (18-69y). Representativeness was ensured by quota sampling on age, sex, profession, and stratification by geographical area/type of urban district. Opportunistic screening for BC (in 533 women, age 45-49y), CRC (in 1331 individuals, age 45-49y) or CC (in 633 women, age 20-24y) was assessed in terms of smoking status (current, former/never smoker), marital status (single, living with a partner), type of residential area (urban, rural), having a close relative with cancer, social vulnerability (EPICES score), and self-reporting own cancer risk (higher, identical/lower than average). Results: In the off-target populations, screening rates were 78% for BC (N = 418, mammogram), 13% for CRC (N = 172, fecal test or colonoscopy) and 42% for CC (N = 264, cervical Pap smear test). Premature BC screening rates were significantly higher (P < 0.05) in non-vulnerable than in vulnerable individuals (84% vs 69%), and among those self-reporting their own BC risk as higher than average (84% vs 76% reporting own BC risk as identical/lower than average). Premature CC screening rates were correlated with: smoking status (66% in current smokers vs 35% in former/never smokers), and marital status (63% in those living with a partner vs 34% single). Lastly, factors correlated with premature CRC screening were: type of residential area (urban, 15% vs rural, 8%), and believing own risk of CRC to be higher than average (27% vs 8% of those who self-reported their own CRC risk as identical/lower than average). Conclusions: This analysis reveals several factors related to premature screening for BC, CRC and CC, provides clear insight into off-target cancer screening uptake profiles, and hints at new strategies to ensure the optimal risk/benefit ratio of screening practices.

We describe the first dense real-time urban seismic–accelerometric network in Italy, named OSU-CT, located in the historic center of Catania. The city lies in the region with the greatest danger, vulnerability, and earthquake exposure in the entire Italian territory. OSU-CT was planned and realized within the project called EWAS “an Early WArning System for cultural heritage”, aimed at the rapid assessment of earthquake-induced damage and the testing of an on-site earthquake early warning system. OSU-CT is mainly based on low-cost instrumentation realized ad hoc by using cutting-edge technologies and digital MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) triaxial accelerometers with excellent resolution and low noise. Twenty of the forty scheduled stations have already been set up on the ground floor of significant historic public buildings. In order to assess the performance of an earthquake early warning (EEW) on-site system, we also installed wide-band velocimeters (ETL3D/5s) in three edifices chosen as test sites, which will be instrumented for a structural health monitoring (SHM). In addition to several laboratory and field validation tests on the developed instruments, an effective operational test of OSU-CT was the Mw 4.3 earthquake occurring on 23 December 2021, 16 km west, south-west of Catania. Peak ground accelerations (4.956 gal to 39.360 gal) recorded by the network allowed obtaining a first urban shakemap and determining a reliable distribution of ground motion in the historical center of the city, useful for the vulnerability studies of the historical edifices.

The limitation of intervention in historical buildings is one of the basic challenges for choosing a strengthening method. Base isolation is one of the best methods which can satisfy such limitations. Although there is a probability to reduce base shear and have negligible drift by base isolating, but it is very important to make sure that the integrity of superstructure reliably stands against the induced acceleration. Lack of integrity leads to local failure mechanisms rather than global failure mechanisms in masonry buildings. For this reason, simplified kinematic limit analysis has been selected as a method in earthquake safety assessment. This paper presents an investigation about the capabilities of simplified kinematic limit analysis as a complementary method, for the seismic safety evaluation of the superstructure of a base isolated masonry historical construction. This method has been applied on the “Naghareh Khaneh” edifice. The Naghareh Khaneh is a masonry historical building in Iran which was constructed around 400 years ago. The main body of this study focuses on the vulnerability assessment of the superstructure after using isolators on the base and the efficiency of simplified kinematic limit analysis will be discussed which shall be based on the results obtained from the out of plane and in plane behaviour of walls after installing isolators and dampers on the base of the Naghareh Khaneh structure.

For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic, naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the foundations of human knowledge. They have been known to cast doubt on divine providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans.

11616 Background: Advances in therapy and early detection, by population-based screening in particular, have significantly increased the number of patients cured from cancer. However, cancer patients’ chances of being cured varies strongly from one cancer to another. We studied the understanding of the concept of cure in the lay population and the factors associated with believing that cancer can be cured. Methods: The French nationwide observational survey, EDIFICE 6, was conducted online (June 26-July 28, 2017) on a core sample of 12 046 individuals (age, 18-69y). Representativeness was ensured by quota sampling on age, sex, profession, and stratification by geographical area/type of urban district. This analysis focused on understanding of the meaning of cure in breast (BC), cervical (CC), colorectal (CRC), lung (LC) and bladder (BLC) cancer for individuals with no history of cancer. Results: The majority of respondents believed that cure exists (BC 95%; CC 91%; CRC 89%; BLC 87%, LC 71%). Some agreed with the definition that cure is the disappearance of the disease (BC 42%; CC 38%; CRC 35%; BLC 33%, LC 25%), while others preferred the definition that cure is several years without disease (BC, CC 53%; CRC, BLS 54%; LC 46%). More men than women (P < 0.05) believed that cure exists for CRC, BLC and LC. Socially non-vulnerable individuals were more likely to believe in cure than their vulnerable counterparts (P < 0.05), as were individuals aged 50-69y (P < 0.05) versus those of 18-50y, and for all cancer types except LC. In multivariate analysis, the variable “clinical research enables progress” was correlated with believing that cure exists (BC, OR = 2.93; CC, OR = 1.86; CRC, OR = 2.22; LC, OR = 1.57, BLC, OR = 2.06), as was “progress is rapid” (BC, OR = 1.61; CC, OR = 1.66; CRC, OR = 1.7; LC, OR = 1.84; BLC OR = 1.68), and also social non-vulnerability. However, the variables “prevention”, respectively screening/treatments, “are important for cancer control” had a low impact on the belief in cure (OR~1). Conclusions: The lay population is relatively optimistic about the cure for cancer. Confidence in the existence of cure relies on medical progress. However, factors related to individual behavior, e.g., prevention and screening, did not affect the perception of cure.

Food security is the of the most important basic human needs. The sphere of agricultural production affects direct or indirect ways to the settlement system, density, socio-demographic parameters. It affect on typology and appearance of agricultural buildings and edifices also. In the past, the size of the city was limited by local food opportunities. Despite the increase in agricultural production every year, natural renewable resources are depleted faster than they can be restored. It is very likely that after 2050 the world ecological collapse may begin. The result will be the inability to feed even half the human population.Active development of food production at the local level it is necessary to prevent such a catastrophic scenario. It will significantly reduce losses during storage and transportation of food, create closed cycles, where waste will be one of the elements of the ecosystem. Much of agricultural production must be located in an anthropogenic environment – an artificial landscape created by human. Local food production will significantly affect on urban planning structure of settlements and visualmorphological structure of architectural objects. Local agricultural production should become a key element of food security. Area vulnerability degree should be primarily determination of urban agricultural production share. Local agro-climatic, energy and technological opportunities will determine the possibility of self-sufficiency in food at the local level. Agrophotovoltaics can become a main landscape-creating element of medium and large cities suburban areas. Integration of agrostuctures in buildings and edifices is possible at various scales and ways. Synergy of energy, agricultural production and waste recycling will be one of the 5–7 key structural planning principles for all architectural objects. Local food production capacity will limit the maximum size of megacities and contribute to a more dispersed settlement structure. information technology and networks is key elements in ensuring of this today. We should actively provide and implement a new solution of variety projects because window of opportunity may be significantly smaller than expected.

Las áreas mineras abandonadas comprenden yacimientos, instalaciones, residuos, maquinarias, etc. Es posible que estos sitios puedan ser reutilizados para uso recreativo y turístico. La metodología de evaluación de la capacidad de acogida del territorio, aporta a la planificación de los usos y la gestión integrada. En los procesos de reutilización de dichas áreas, es necesario determinar la aptitud, vulnerabilidad, fragilidad y rasgos que permitan establecer intervenciones adecuadas. El cese de la explotación de granito en Tandil, es el producto de varios hechos: la finalización de los permisos de explotación, la disminución de rentabilidad y la presión de la sociedad local. Como resultado han quedado taludes, depósitos, maquinarias y edificios en estado de abandono, y en conjunto paisajes degradados. El uso recreativo planificado, daría a estos sitios un nuevo rol, según la capacidad del lugar para recibir usos hipotéticos. Este trabajo analiza las potencialidades para el desarrollo de actividades educativo-recreativas en una cantera de granito inactiva (Cantera Interlen) ubicada en el área periurbana de Tandil. Abstract The abandoned mining areas include deposits, facilities, waste, machineries, etc. It is possible that these sites may be reused for recreational use and tourism. The methodology for the assessment of the capacity of reception of the territory, it brings to the planning of the uses and integrated management. In the processes of re-use of these areas, it´s necessary to determine the suitability, vulnerability, fragility and traits that allow them to establish appropriate interventions. Stopping the exploitation of granite in Tandil, is the product of several facts: the end of operating permits, the drop in profitability and the pressure of the local society. As a result have been slopes, cavas, deposits, machinery and buildings in a state of abandonment, and in whole degraded landscapes. The recreational use planned, would give these sites a new role, depending on the capability of the place to receive hypothetical uses. This paper analyzes the potential for the development of educational and recreational activities in a granite quarry inactive (Interlen Cantera) located in the periurban area of Tandil.

Resumen: El hábitat, lugar donde se redefine territorialmente la cultura de un grupo diverso, es un escenario para los encuentros y desencuentros, la luz y la oscuridad. La investigación se origina en los procesos de reasentamiento habitacional que ocurrieron en el eje cafetero a raíz del terremoto del año 1991, y tomó como estudio de caso específico la Ciudadela Simón Bolívar en Armenia. Su objetivo, indagar posibles causas de la fuerte ruptura que se presentó en el proceso de reasentamiento. El método de trabajo, se desarrolla mediante una investigación - acción, buscando reconstruir una experiencia replicable en otros sectores del país. Como resultados del estudio se proponen una serie de factores que deben tenerse en cuenta para el desarrollo de una estrategia habitacional sustentable para poblaciones en condición de vulnerabilidad y de marginalidad. Entre las conclusiones más significativas se plantea, tener siempre presente en los procesos de intervención del hábitat, que se construye y se edifica para seres humanos que en su complejidad no son sujetos de diagnósticos irrefutables, lo planeado no siempre es el resultado de lo esperado. Siendo necesaria la modelación conjunta de las estrategias de sostenibilidad, superando las visiones cortoplacistas que solo llevan a una pérdida enorme de recursos, de esfuerzos y de agotamiento del capital social que se haya logrado construir. ___Palabras Clave: Hábitat, asentamientos humanos, marginalidad, sostenibilidad, desarrollo humano. ___Abstract: The habitat, place where there is territorially re-defined the culture of a diverse group, is a scene for the meetings and misunderstandings, the light and the darkness. The origins of the research in the processes of housing resettlements that happened in the coffee axis immediately after the earthquake of the year 1991, and take Simon Bolívar neighborhood in Armenia, as a study case of specific case. His aim was to investigate possible reasons of the strong break that one presented in the process of resettlement. The method of work - action develops by means of an investigation, seeking to reconstruct an experience replicable in other sectors of the country. The results of the study propose themselves a series of factors that must be born in mind for the development of a sustainably strategy for populations in condition of vulnerability and of marginality. The most significant conclusions appears, to have always present in the processes of intervention of the habitat, which is constructed and is built for human beings who in his complexity are not subjects of irrefutable diagnoses, not always it is the result of the awaited thing. Being necessary the modeling combines of the strategies of sustainability, overcoming the short visions that only lead to an enormous loss of resources, of efforts and of weakening of the share capital that has been achieved to construct. ___Keywords: Habitat, human settlements, marginality, sustainability, human development. ___Recibido febrero 10 de 2014 / Aceptado abril 28 de 2014

La mayoría de los edificios que se encuentran en Guayaquil no cumplen con las normas vigentes por el Código Ecuatoriano de la Construcción (NEC 2015). Por esa razón, este libro profundiza en el estudio del comportamiento del bloque (B) del Colegio Vicente Rocafuerte ante la aplicación de cargas horizontales, lo que determina la capacidad de la estructura como está. Posteriormente, se expone un análisis no lineal de la estructura, que tiene como fin determinar con certeza los daños que sufriría al ser sometida a los sismos esperados en la ciudad de Guayaquil. Este estudio permite establecer cuál es la mejor propuesta de reforzamiento para que la estructura tenga una sólida resistencia ante sismos esperados.

There has been increasing interest in mining polymetallic sulfide deposits at deep-sea inactive hydrothermal vents, leading to the development of regulations to minimize risk to the marine environment. While an extensive body of literature exists on the ecological communities at active vents, fauna at inactive hydrothermal vents and the vent periphery are poorly described and their vulnerability to disturbance is unknown. We examined patterns in abundance of non-vent epibenthic megafauna on two segments of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, Northeast Pacific Ocean. Video footage was collected by the remotely operated vehicle ROPOS during four dives at the Endeavour Segment and two dives at Middle Valley in August 2016. At the Endeavour Segment, the substrate is characterized predominantly by basalt and edifices of hydrothermal sulfide that range in hydrothermal activity from inactive to vigorous, high-temperature venting. In contrast, Middle Valley is heavily sedimented and most hydrothermal activity is low-temperature diffuse flow. While inactive substrates at both sites harboured slow-growing sessile fauna, the dominant members of the community differed between sites. At Endeavour, the most abundant morphotaxa included rossellid vase sponges, alcyonacean corals, and crinoids. Estimated richness and total abundance of morphotaxa was higher on hard substrates than sedimented substrates and highest on inactive chimneys. At Middle Valley, the most abundant morphotaxa included antipatharian corals, anemones, and ascidians. Species richness was higher on inactive chimneys and mixed substrates than sediment. The abundance of some megafauna varied with proximity to active vents. At Endeavour, deep-water corals were nearly absent within 25 m of active chimneys and very few occurred between 26 and 50 m from active chimneys. Rossellid vase sponges were in low abundance within 25 m of active chimneys but were more abundant than corals at 26-50 m from active chimneys. This project contributes baseline data on megafaunal assemblages on inactive hydrothermal vents and can provide the basis for more focused research on the structure and function of inactive vent ecosystems.

The past two decades have seen the publication of at least half a dozen books that consider the part that fairs, circuses, sideshows and freakshows play in the continuing cultural labour to define, categorise and control the human body, including Robert Bogdan’s Freakshow, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, and her edited collection Freakery, and Rachel Adams’s Sideshow USA. These writers cast the freakshow as a theatre of culture, worthy of critical attention precisely because of the ways in which it has provided a popular forum for staging, solidifying and transforming ideas about the body and bodily difference, and because of its prominence in the project of modernity (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 2-13). They point to the theatrical mechanisms by which the freakshow maps cultural anxieties about corporeal difference across ‘suitable’ bodies. For, as Bogdan (3) says, being a freak is far more than a fact of biology. The freak personae that populate the Western cultural imaginary—the fat lady, the bearded lady, the hermaphrodite and the geek—can only be produced by a performative isolation, manipulation and exaggeration of the peculiar characteristics of particular human bodies. These peculiarities have to be made explicit, in Rebecca Schneider’s (1) terms; the horror-inducing tropes of the savage, the bestial and the monstrous have to be cast across supposedly suitable and compliant flesh. The scopic mechanisms of the freakshow as a theatre, as a cabinet of corporeal curiosities in which spectators are excited, amazed and edified by the spectacle of the extraordinary body, thus support the specific forms of seeing and looking by which freak bodies are produced. It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that the titillating threat of this face-to-face encounter with the Levinasian other fully destabilises the space between signifier and signified, between the specific body and the symbolic framework in which it sits. In a somewhat paradoxical cultural manoeuvre, the ableist, sexist and racist symbolic frameworks of the freakshow unfold according to what Deleuze and Guattari (178) would call a logic of sameness. The roles, relationships and representational mechanisms of the freakshow—including the ‘talkers’ that frame the spectator’s engagement with the extraordinary body of the freak—in fact function to delineate “degrees of deviance” (178) or difference from an illusory bodily norm. So configured, the monstrous corporeality of the freak is also monstrously familiar, and is made more so by the freak spectacle’s frequent emphasis on the ways in which non-normative bodies accommodate basic functions such as grooming and eating. In such incarnations, the scenography and iconography of the freakshow in fact draws spectators into performative (mis)recognitions that manage the difference of other bodies by positioning them along a continuum that confirms the stability of the symbolic order, and the centrality of the able, white, male self in this symbolic order. Singular, specific, extraordinary bodies are subject to what might, in a Levinasian paradigm, be called the violence of categorisation and comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 9). The circumstances of the encounter reduce the radical, unreadable difference of the other, transporting them “into the horizon of knowledge” (“Transcendence and Height” 12), and transforming them into something that serves the dominant cultural logic. In this sense, Petra Kuppers suggests, “the psychic effects of the freak spectacle have destabilizing effects, assaulting the boundaries of firm knowledge about self, but only to strengthen them again in cathartic effect” (45). By casting traits they abhor across the freak body (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 55-56), spectators become complicit in this abhorrence; comforted, cajoled and strangely pleasured by a sense of distance from what they desire not to be. The subversive potential of the prodigious body evaporates (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 3; Extraordinary Bodies 78). An evaporation more fully effected, writers on the freakshow explain, as the discursive construct of the freak was drawn into the sphere of medical spectacle in the late nineteenth century. As the symbolic framework for understanding disabled bodies ‘advances’ from the freak, the monster and the mutant to the medical specimen (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 13; Extraordinary Bodies 70, 78-80; Synder and Mitchell 370-373; Stephens 492), the cultural trajectory away from extraordinary bodies with the capacity to expand the classes and categories of the human is complete. The medical profession finally fulfils the cultural compulsion to abstract peculiar bodily characteristics into symptoms, and, as Foucault says in The Birth of the Clinic, these symptoms become surveillable, and controllable, within an objective schema of human biology. Physical differences and idiosyncrasies are “enclosed within the singularity of the patient, in that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not only the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known” (xi). The freak body becomes no more than an example of human misfortune, to be examined, categorised and cared for by medical experts behind closed doors, and the freakshow fades from the stage of popular culture (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 70). There can, of course, be no denying the need to protect people with disabilities from exploitation at the service of a cultural fetish that enacts a compulsion to define and control bodily difference. However, recent debates in disability, cultural and performance studies have been characterised by the desire to reconsider the freakshow as a site for contesting some of the cultural logics it enacts. Theorists like Synder and Mitchell argue that medical discourse “disarms the [disabled] body of its volatile potency” (378), in the process denying people with disabilities a potentially interesting site to contest the cultural logics by which their bodies are defined. The debate begins with Bogdan’s discussion of the ways in which well-meaning disability activists may, in their desire to protect people with disabilities from exploitative practices and producers, have overlooked the fact that freakshows provided people with disabilities a degree of independence and freedom otherwise impossible (280-81). After all, as disabled performer Mat Fraser says in his documentary Born Freak, The Victorian marvels found fame and some fortune, and this actually raised the visibility, even the acceptability, of disabled people in general during a time when you could be attacked on the streets just for looking different. These disabled performers found independence and commanded respect.… If I had been born a hundred years ago, given the alternatives of—what? living the life of a village monster or idiot or being poked or prodded for cataloguing by medical types—there’s no doubt about it, I would have wanted to be in show business. (Born Freak) This question of agency extends to discussion of whether disabled performers like Fraser can, by consciously appropriating the figures, symbols and scenography of the freakshow, start to deconstruct the mechanisms by which this contested sphere of cultural practice has historically defined them, confronting spectators with their own complicity in the construction of the freak. In her analysis of Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore, Elizabeth Stephens reflects on this contemporary sideshow’s capacity to reclaim the political currency of the freak. For Stephens, sideshows are sites in which norms about the body, its limits and capabilities, are theatricalized and transformed into spectacle, but, in which, for this very reason, they can also be contested. Non-normative bodies are not simply exhibited or put on display on the sideshow stage, but are rather performed as the unstable—indeed, destabilising—product of the dynamic interrelationship between performer, audience and theatrical space. (486) Theorists like Stephens (487) point to disabled performers who manipulate the scopic and discursive mechanisms of the sideshow, street performance and circus, setting them against more or less personal accounts of the way their bodies have historically been seen, to disrupt the modes of subjection the freak spectacle makes possible and precipitate a crisis in prescribed categories of meaning. Stephens (485-498) writes of Mat Fraser, who reperformed the historical personal of the short-armed Sealo the Sealboy, and Jennifer Miller, who reperformed the persona of Zenobia the bearded lady, at Sideshows by the Seashore. Sharon Mazer (257-276) writes of Katy Dierlam, who donned a Dolly Dimples babydoll dress to reperform the clichéd fat lady figure Helon Melon, again at Sideshows by the Seashore, counterposing Melon’s monstrous obesity with comments affirming her body’s potent humanity, and quotes from feminist scholars and artists such as Suzy Orbach, Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle. Sharon Synder and David Mitchell (383) write of Mary Duffy, who reperforms the armless figure of the Venus de Milo. These practices constitute performative interventions into the cultural sphere, aligned with a broader set of contemporary performance practices which contest the symbolic frameworks by which racial and gender characteristics are displayed on the popular stage in similar ways. Their confrontational performance strategies recall, for instance, the work of American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who reappropriates colonial and pop cultural figurations of the racialised body in works like Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, in which he and Coco Fusco cast themselves as two caged savages. In such works, Gómez-Peña and his collaborators use parallel performance strategies to engage the “spectacle of the Other-as-freak” (297). “The idea is to exaggerate the features of fear and desire in the Anglo imagination and ‘spectacularize’ our ‘extreme identities’, so to speak, with the clear understanding that these identities have been invented by the surgery of the global media” (297) Gómez-Peña says. These remobilisations of the monstrous operate within the paradigm of the explicit, a term Schneider coined a decade ago to describe the performance art practices of women who write the animalised, sexualised characteristics with which they are symbolically aligned across their own corporeally ‘suitable’ bodies, replaying their culturally assigned identities “with a voluble, ‘in your face’ vengeance” (100), “a literal vengeance” (109). Such practices reclaim the destablising potential of the freak spectacle, collapsing, complicating or exploding the space between signifier and signified to show that the freak is a discursive construct (22-23), and thus for Schneider, following Benjamin, threatening the whole symbolic system with collapse (2, 6). By positioning their bodies as a ground that manifestly fails to ground the reality they represent, these performers play with the idea that the reality of the freak is really just part of the order of representation. There is nothing behind it, nothing beyond it, nothing up the magician’s sleeve—identity is but a sideshow hall of mirrors in which the ‘blow off’ is always a big disappointment. Bodies marked by disability are not commodified, or even clearly visible, in the Western capitalist scopic economy in the same way as Schneider’s women performers. Nevertheless, disabled performers still use related strategies to reclaim a space for what Schneider calls a postmodern politics of transgression (4), exposing “the sedimented layers of signification themselves” (21), rather than establishing “an originary, true or redemptive body” (21) beneath. The contestational logic of these modes of practice notwithstanding, Stephens (486) notes that performers still typically cite a certain ambivalence about their potential. There are, after all, specific risks for people with disabilities working in this paradigm that are not fully drawn out in the broader debate about critical reappropriation of racist and sexist imagery in performance art. Mobilisations of the freak persona are complicated by the performer’s own corporeal ‘suitability’ to that persona, by the familiar theatrical mechanisms of recognition and reception (which can remain undertheorised in meta-level considerations of the political currency of the freakshow in disability and cultural—rather than performance—studies), and by a dominant cultural discourse that insists on configuring disability as an individual problem detached from the broader sphere of identity politics (Sandahl 598-99). In other words, the territory that still needs to be addressed in this emergent field of practice is the ethics of reception, and the risk of spectatorial (mis)recognitions that reduce the political potency of the freak spectacle. The main risk, of course, is that mobilisations of the freak persona may still be read by spectators as part of the phenomenon they are trying to challenge, the critical counterpositions failing to register, or failing to disrupt fully the familiar scopic and discursive framework. More problematically, the counterpositions themselves may be reduced by spectators to a rhetorical device that distances them from the corporeal reality of the encounter with the other, enabling them to interpret or explain the experience of disability as a personal experience by which an individual comes to accommodate their problems. Whilst the human desire to construct narrative and psychological contexts for traumatic experience cannot be denied, Carrie Sandahl (583) notes that there is a risk that the encounter with the disabled body will be interpreted as part of the broader phenomenon Synder and Mitchell describe in Narrative Prosthesis, in which disability is little more than a metaphor for the problems people have to get past in life. In this interpretative paradigm, disability enters a discursive and theoretical terrain that fails to engage fully the lived experience of the other. Perhaps most problematically, mobilisations of the freak persona may be read as one more manifestation of the distinctively postmodern desire to break free from the constraints of culturally condoned identity categories. This desire finds expression in the increasingly prevalent cultural phenomenon of voluntary enfreakment, in which people voluntarily differentiate, or queer their own experience of self. As Fraser says when he finds out that a company of able-bodied freaks is competing with him for audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, “[t]he irony is, these days, everyone is trying to get in on our act” (Born Freak). In a brave new world where everybody wants to be a freak, activist artists “must be watchful”, Gómez-Peña warns, “for we can easily get lost in the funhouse of virtual mirrors, epistemological inversions, and distorted perceptions” (288). The reclamation of disability as a positive metaphor for a more dispersed set of human differences in the spectacle of daily life (287-98), and in theoretical figurations of feminist philosophy that favour the grotesque, the monstrous and the mechanical (Haraway Simians, Cyborgs and Women; Braidotti Nomadic Subjects), raises questions for Garland-Thomson (“Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 9) and Sandahl (581-83). If “disability serves as a master trope for difference,” Sandahl says, then anybody can adopt it “…to serve as a metaphor expressing their own outsider status, alienation and alterity, not necessarily the social, economic and political concerns of actual disabled people” (583). The work of disabled performers can disappear into a wider sphere of self-differentiated identities, which threatens to withdraw ‘disability’ as a politically useful category around which a distinctive group of people can generate an activist politics. To negotiate these risks, disabled performers need to work somewhere between a specific, minoritarian politics and a universal, majoritarian politics, as Sedgwick describes in Epistemology of the Closet (91; cf. Garland-Thompson “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 5; cf. Stephens 493). Performers need to make their experience of otherness explicit, so that their corporeal specificity is not abstracted into a symbolic system that serves the dominant cultural logic. Performers need to contextualise this experience in social terms, so that it is not isolated from the sphere of identity politics. But performers cannot always afford to allow the freak persona to become one more manifestation of the myriad idiosyncratic identities that circulate in the postmodern popular imaginary. It is by negotiating these risks that performers encourage spectators to experience—if only fleetingly, and provisionally—a relationship to the other that is characterised not by generalisation, domestication and containment (Levinas “Substitution” 80, 88), but by respect for the other’s radical alterity, by vulnerability, and, in Derrida’s reformation of Levinasian ethics, by a singular, reciprocal and undecidable responsibility towards the other (Derrida 60-70). This is what Levinas would call an ethical relationship, in which the other exists, but as an excess, a class of being that can be recognised but never seized by comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 7, “Transcendence and Height” 17), or sublimated as a category of, or complement to, the same (13, “Meaning and Sense” 51). Mat Fraser’s mobilisation of Sealo the Sealboy is one of the most engaging examples of the way disabled performers negotiate the complexities of this terrain. On his website, Fraser says he has always been aware of the power of confrontational presentations of his own body, and has found live forms that blur the boundaries between freakshow, sideshow and conventional theatre the best forums for “the more brutal and confrontational aspect of my investigation into disability’s difficult interface with mainstream cultural concerns” (MatFraser.co.uk). Fraser’s appropriation of Sealo was born of a fascination with the historical figure of Stanley Berent. “Stanley Berent was an American freakshow entertainer from the 1940s who looked like me,” Fraser says. “He had phocomelia. That’s the medical term for my condition. It literally means seal-like limbs. Berent’s stage name was Sealo the Sealboy” (Born Freak). Fraser first restaged Sealo after a challenge from Dick Zigun, founder of the modern Sideshows by the Seashore. He restaged Berant’s act, focused on Berant’s ability to do basic things like shaving and sawing wood with his deformed hands, for the sideshow’s audiences. While Fraser had fun playing the character on stage, he says he felt a particular discomfort playing the character on the bally platform used to pull punters into the sideshow from the street outside. “There is no powerful dynamic there,” Fraser laments. “It’s just ‘come look at the freak’” (Born Freak). Accordingly, after a season at Sideshows by the Seashore, Fraser readapted the experience as a stage play, Sealboy: Freak, in which Sealo is counterposed with the character Tam, “a modern disabled actor struggling to be seen as more than a freak” (Born Freak). This shift in the theatrical mechanisms by which he stages the freak gives Fraser the power to draw contemporary, politically correct spectators at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival into the position of sideshow gawkers, confronting them with their own fascination with his body. A potent example is a post-audition scene, in which Tam says I read this book once that said that the mainstream will only see a disabled performer in the same way they view a performing seal. Very clever, but just mimicry. No. No it can’t be like that anymore. We’ve all moved on. People are no longer more fascinated by how I do things, rather than what I say. I am an actor, not a fucking freak. (Born Freak) But, as Tam says this, he rolls a joint, and spectators are indeed wrapped up in how he does it, hardly attending to what he says. What is interesting about Fraser’s engagement with Sealo in Sealboy: Freak is the way he works with a complicated—even contradictory—range of presentational strategies. Fraser’s performance becomes explicit, expositional and estranging by turns. At times, he collapses his own identity into that of the freak, the figure so stark, so recognisable, so much more harshly drawn than its real-life referent, that it becomes a simulacrum (cf. Baudrillard 253-282), exceeding and escaping the complications of the human corporeality beneath it. Fraser allows spectators to inhabit the horror, and the humour, his disabled identity has historically provoked, reengaging the reactions they hide in everyday life. And, perhaps, if they are an educated audience at the Fringe, applauding themselves for their own ability to comprehend the freak, and the crudity of sideshow display. However, self-congratulatory comprehension of the freak persona is interrupted by the discomforting encounter with Tam, suspending—if only provisionally—spectators’ ability to reconcile this reaction with their credentials as a politically correct audience. What a closer look at mobilisations of the freak in performances such as Fraser’s demonstrates is that manipulating the theatrical mechanisms of the stage, and their potential to rapidly restructure engagement with the extraordinary body, enables performers to negotiate the risk of (mis)recognition embedded in the face-to-face encounter between self and spectator. So configured, the stage can become a site for contesting the cultural logic by which the disabled body has historically been defined. It can challenge spectators to experience—if fleetingly—the uncertainties of the face-to-face encounter with the extraordinary body, acknowledging this body’s specificity, without immediately being able to abstract, domesticate or abdicate responsibility for it—or abdicate responsibility for their own reaction to it. Whilst spectators’ willingness to reflect further on their complicity in the construction of the other remains an open and individual question, these theatrical manipulations can at least increase the chance that the cathartic effect of the encounter with the so-called freak will be disrupted or deferred. References Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chigaco Press, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precision of Simulacra”. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1984, 253-282. Born Freak. Dir. Paul Sapin. Written Paul Sapin and Mat Fraser. 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Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Extreme States: Issues of Scale—Political, Performative, Emotional”, the Australasian Association for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies Annual Conference 2007.