  The analysis of the seismic vulnerability of urban centres has received a
great attention in the last century. In order to estimate the seismic
vulnerability of a densely populated urban area, it would in principle be
necessary to develop in-depth analyses for predicting the dynamic behaviour of
the individual buildings and their structural aggregation. Such analyses,
however, are extremely cost-intensive, require great processing time and above
all expertise judgement. It is therefore very useful to define simplified rules
for estimating the seismic vulnerability of whole urban areas. In the last
decades, the Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) scenario has gained increasing
credibility as a mathematical framework for explaining a large number of
naturally occurring extreme events, from avalanches to earthquakes dynamics,
from bubbles and crises in financial markets to the extinction of species in
the evolution or the behaviour of human brain activity. All these examples show
the intrinsic tendency common to many phenomena to spontaneously organize into
a dynamical critical state, whose signature is the presence of a power law
behaviour in the frequency distribution of events. In this context, the
Olami-Feder- Christensen (OFC) model, introduced in 1992, has played a key role
in modelling earthquakes phenomenology. The aim of the present paper is
proposing an agent-based model of earthquake dynamics, based on the OFC self-
organized criticality framework, in order to evaluate the effects of a critical
sequence of seismic events on a given large urban area during a given interval
of time. The further integration of a GIS database within a software
environment for agent-based simulations, will allow to perform a preliminary
parametric study of these effects on real datasets. The model could be useful
for defining planning strategies for seismic risk reduction
