Nowadays, the refined models of simulation to evaluate the seismic damage in an urban area are becoming of paramount interest for the scientific community. Regional seismic damage simulation can potentially provide valuable information that can facilitate decision making, enhance planning for disaster mitigation, and reduce human and economic losses. However, the application of refined models is limited because of their high computational cost and needs of highly experienced users. For these reasons, these approaches remain academic experiences. This study proposes a straightforward approach to the problem, at the same time competitive, to simulate the seismic response and to assess the degree of damage at urban scale. At first, the simulation of the standard building is performed using an equivalent single degree of freedom model. Subsequently, the same approach is extended to a number of regular buildings from a virtual city sample for time-history seismic response analysis. The first part of this work is devoted to present the methodology to prepare the one-degree-of-freedom model of the standard building by comparing it with a refined multi degrees of freedom model as a target. Finally, a seismic damage simulation of a virtual city sample is implemented to demonstrate the capacity and advantages of the proposed method at increasing seismic intensities for damage assessment. It is the starting phase for further multi-hazards analyses at the regional scale through agent-based models
