The longue durée of a flood: studying urban landscape transformations from a disaster resilience perspective

Disasters are not sudden, unexpected ruptures; they are the result of long-term socio-environmental and technological transformations that generate exposure and vulnerability. To understand how risk is produced and sustained, it is essential to develop a historical perspective which draws on longue durée readings of territorial, infrastructural, and political change. Focusing on Moncalieri (metropolitan Turin) and the flood of 15–16 October 2000, this article develops a three-scale reading that combines archival sources with GIS-based spatial analysis. At the event scale, it reconstructs the emergency to show how infrastructures, decision points, and coordination practices shaped the distribution of damage. At the urban scale, it tracks the coupling of river works, energy production, canal diversions, and settlement growth along the Po, showing how development concentrated people, assets, and critical services in flood-prone areas. At the Po-basin scale, it situates Moncalieri within wider shifts in river management, highlighting how interventions and responsibilities displace risk across space and time. Rather than treating the flood as an anomaly, it reads historical and territorial production of risk. Read together, these scales foreground the processes through which exposure and vulnerability are historically assembled and argue for the necessity of a longue durée perspective to grasp their complexity.