Resilience in small urban centers with a strong historical connotation

Abstract

If we consider resilience in a historical town according to its response to natural disasters and emergency cases, this capacity goes beyond all our expectations. It happens especially when the settlement principle of a historical center, occurred transformations caused by disasters, and redundancies increase the coping capacity and capacity of response of historic buildings amplifying their value.
However, in order to take abandoned or nearly uninhabited urban heritages back - a very common event in our territory - raising new qualities can be seen as a true need of retrofit, maintenance and management measures aiming at increasing safety and resilience or, in other words, improving livable spaces, paying a new and special interest towards those areas, and putting into effect a practical possibility to reuse and repopulate them.
This paper offers the first results of researches concerning small historical villages - interesting samples of a wide national heritage. The goal of this study is to explore some methodological aspects: we have started with a deep study of the urban tissue and historical buildings in each small center (analyzing both building functions and typologies, and the nature of built heritage in conformity with building typologies, vulnerability features, practical accessibility, and potential mobility); then, we have made a sensitivity analysis with previsions of critical contexts and, finally, we have defined prevention proposals and emergency and risk management plans identifying works for increasing performances (safety and mobility under stressing conditions) that are suitable and consistent with the existing heritage.