Resilience to landslide hazard: a visual and numerical investigation of property price differentials

In coastal areas the high frequency of extreme events has become – and is becoming – an increasingly complex problem. While the research frontier of evaluation and planning fields have evolved to cope with such challenges, the need is to be ever more alert and create innovative solutions for immediate security concerns as well as strategic plans for the longer term for the communities at risk. A pragmatic approach built around complexity modelling and simulations offers here a promising avenue of research. The city of Trondheim, Norway, exemplifies the argument, as the particular research problem here concerns the spatial overlap between quick clay landslide hazard zones and residential property price levels. This extent of this overlap is investigated based on sales transaction data and computational modelling using SOM (Self-organizing map, Kohonen) algorithms against a backdrop of a ‘complexity view’ on changes in physical and economic circumstances.