Integrated Evaluation Model of Construction Vulnerability in Anthropic Fill Areas (IALV). Case Study: District of Villaverde in the City of Madrid, Spain

Over the coming years, developments of large urban areas are expected, many of them on plots where soil conditions may not be the most suitable for building. This is the case of plots that previously have been used for dumping anthropic fill deposits. The term anthropic fill included a large variety of materials, all of them related with human activity; but this paper is mainly focused on natural materials extracted from nearby excavations or construction debris that form non-contaminated lands. In a review of literature related to risks, it is observed that in the last 10 years there have been abundant investigations to determine vulnerability in urban areas. However, the risks derived from the presence of anthropic landfills have generally been overlooked. For this reason, there is a real need to quantify construction vulnerability in areas settled on anthropic landfills. A methodology, up to now unknown, must be created to estimate and extrapolate it to any part of the world. The aim is to avoid the likelihood of pathologies appearing in urban areas. Hence, and to address this lack of knowledge, an Integrated Evaluation Model has been developed. Its purpose is to quantify, simply but effectively, the construction vulnerability index in already consolidated areas of historic landfills. The proposed model has been validated in a very popular district of the city of Madrid. Its surface, the number of buildings affected and population involved make it truly representative.