Mitigating Multi-risks in the Historical Built Environment: A Multi-strategy Adaptive Approach

The built environment is subject to complex combinations of cascading disasters, sudden onset disasters (SUODs), such as earthquakes, or slow onset disasters (SLODs), such as pollution and heat islands. They can cause harm to people and destroy the built environment. Moreover, the historical built environment (HBE) possesses typical characteristics that increase the risks, for two main reasons: the HBE construction features, which are vulnerable to SUODs and SLODs; the disruption of the cultural heritage, which is part of the HBE. To preserve the HBE, suitable strategies to adapt to increasingly frequent SUODs and SLODs should be considered in a multi-risk, multi-strategy perspective, as some of them are able to mitigate more than one risk simultaneously. Therefore, the contribution of this article is to propose a multi-strategy approach for mitigating multi-risks in the HBE, by means of (i) the definition of Built Environment Typologies (BETs), which are clustered to represent typical HBEs, and (ii) a critical overview of the literature and expert judgement, which is used to hypothesize strategies’ combinations on peculiar BETs. Another original contribution is the focus on the open spaces portion of the HBE. Indeed, they are often overlooked, while they constitute a crucial portion of the HBE, where there is high exposure to risk, as open spaces are among the most used spaces, and are affected not only by their characteristics but also by those of their frontiers. The findings of this work contribute to frame multi-risk multi-strategies approaches for the HBE, towards adaptive and resilient HBEs.