Historic towns, old urban quarters, villages and hamlets, as well as historic landscapes make up a significant part of Europe’s identity: Natural heritage sites cover roughly 18% of the European land territory (The European Commission, 2018) and on average 22% of the European housing stock was constructed before 1946 (Nicol et al, 2016). These historic areas are deeply embedded in larger urban and rural environments, serving a role in preserving local identity and personality as well as local knowledge.
However, while negative impacts of climate-related and other hazards on contemporary urban areas are widely adressed in literature and research, their impacts on historic areas and their communities, have not yet been studied extensively. Climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction also seldom register as a priority areas for heritage management.
Increasing the resilience of historic areas, with their unique structure, therefore calls for advanced decision support solutions that combine disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, and heritage management. These tools must enable municipal staff, practitioners and decision-makers to address both the chronic stresses posed by climate change as well as the shocks and existing risks posed by other disasters in collaboration with the local communities. However, to date, typical decision support solutions to increase resilience still consider disaster risk management and climate change adaptation in isolation. In addition, these solutions need to take the unique physical, environmental, economic, social, cultural, and political aspects of historic areas, as well as the enabling conditions these areas provide for taking action into account.
However, tools and methods alone are not enough. They need to be supported by a stronger promotion of relevant public policies and participatory governance processes, which include residents from local communities and a general public. The awareness of climate change impacts on historic areas needs to be increased, resilience building strategies need to be included in heritage management policies and practices, while at the same time the role heritage can play for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction within the wider urban context has to be emphasized.
The EU Horizon 2020 research project ARCH took a step in this direction. It provided a resilience framework and a suite of tools for assessing and improving the resilience of historic areas. These solutions were applied in four city cases and distributed via a Mutual Learning Framework to 12 additional European cities and towns. Via this co-development and co-application, ARCH had significant impact on local resilience management of historic areas, breaking silos, and advancing integration between diciplines.
Finally, using the learnings from applying these solutions, ARCH made recommendations to decision-makers, practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers on how to make use of the opportunities provided by historic areas and how to adress still existing open challanges to increase their resilience.
