Abstract This paper investigates the amplification of seismic waves in urban environments caused by the collective response of low-rise masonry building clusters. Conventional site-response and single-building models often fail to explain the observed distribution of seismic damage in urban areas, as they neglect the resonance phenomena arising from structural clustering. To address this gap, we integrate geophysical transient simulations with Floquet–Bloch analysis and discrete resonator modelling. Together, these approaches provide a consistent multi-scale understanding of seismic wave trapping in urban building clusters. The findings highlight that seismic vulnerability assessments may move beyond isolated-structure analysis to account for resonance effects in clustered configurations. This integrative framework provides theoretical ideas that may enhance both diagnostic insight and predictive capability for seismic hazard assessments and mitigation in densely populated environments. This study is not linked to any formal geotechnical surveys and should be treated as a complimentary theoretical approach in combination with the existing methods of geotechnical assessments.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.