The ARCH Resilience Assessment Dashboard: An Online Scorecard Approach to Assess the Resilience of Historic Areas

The increasing recognition of the importance of resilience in various sectors, such as disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, and urban planning resulted in a growing demand for tools and frameworks that can effectively measure and evaluate resilience. Scorecard approaches for the assessment of resilience have become more prominent in recent years. They provide a structured and quantitative way to assess resilience, allowing a monitoring of the resilience building progress of different systems or communities. In addition, the complexity and interconnectedness of modern systems requires a comprehensive assessment of resilience, considering multiple dimensions and factors. Scorecards offer a holistic view by incorporating various indicators and metrics, providing a more comprehensive understanding of resilience and its strengths and weaknesses. Scorecard approaches also facilitate decision-making and planning by providing clear and actionable information, enabling stakeholders to identify areas of improvement, prioritize interventions, and track progress over time.

Until recently, no scorecard approach for the assessment of the resilience of historic areas existed. The ARCH Resilience Assessment Dashboard (RAD) [1] closes this gap by providing an online scorecard that allows heritage managers, urban planners, disaster risk managers and other actors to jointly self-assess the resilience of their historic area.

The core of the RAD are 221 questions, categorized into ten overarching Essentials – an adapted version of the Ten Essential for Making Cities Resilient [2] – three disaster risk management phases, four topics (disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, heritage management, social justice), and six resilience dimensions (built environment, natural environment, economy, policy, society, and culture). Each question is answered on a 6-point Likert scale and supported by explanatory information, including potential stakeholders who have the information needed to answer the question.

The RAD provides users with a score, which indicates the performance in the different aspects relevant to building resilience. By analyzing the results, users can identify weak points in the resilience of the historic area. Based on these results, users can formulate a list of actions for increasing the resilience. To support this process, the RAD is linked to the ARCH Resilience Measures Inventory, an online database of resilience measures compatible with the Essentials of the RAD. By conducting several resilience assessments, the RAD can also be used to monitor resilience over time.

The RAD was co-developed and evaluated for four historic areas as part of the Horizon 2020 project ARCH (grant agreement No. 820999): the Old Town of Bratislava (Slovakia), the Old Town of Camerino (Italy), the World Heritage Site Speicherstadt and Kontorhausviertel in Hamburg (Germany), and the Huerta de Valencia (Spain).

This contribution will introduce the concept of the RAD and present the results of its trial application in the four historic areas.

References

[1] Fraunhofer IAIS, „Resilience Assessment Dashboard“, https://rad.savingculturalheritage.eu/

[2] UNDRR, “The TEN Essentials for Making Cities Resilient,” https://mcr2030.undrr.org/ten-essentials-making-cities-resilient