A Resilience Tool Suite for Historic Areas: Experiences from the ARCH project

Historic towns, districts, and cultural landscapes are integral to the fabric of urban and rural territories, offering vital social and economic functions. The detrimental effects of climate change on these historic areas extend beyond material damage, leading to the irreplaceable loss of intangible cultural values. To safeguard these treasures for future generations, it is essential to develop resilience management tools and methods that address the unique needs of heritage management.

The H2020 project ARCH (Advancing Resilience of Historic Areas against Climate-related and other Hazards) has pioneered a resilience tool suite tailored for historic areas, in collaboration with the cities of Bratislava (Slovakia), Camerino (Italy), Hamburg (Germany), and Valencia (Spain). This toolkit is built upon a resilience framework that integrates climate change adaptation and disaster risk management with heritage management requirements. Key components of the tool suite include:

• A geo-information system for analyzing hazards affecting historic areas
• A mixed-method risk analysis approach
• An inventory of resilience measures and a pathway visualization tool
• A resilience assessment dashboard

In addition to the collaborative efforts with the four pilot cities, the ARCH project has validated its tools and methods through a Mutual Learning Framework involving 12 additional European cities. Via the EU R&I Task Force for Climate Neutral and Resilient Historic Urban Districts, founded by ARCH and it’s sibling projects SHELTER and HYPERION, additional European stakeholders from policy, research and practice provided insights for the development of the tools and methods.

This contribution introduces the resilience tool suite and shares insights from the co-creation process, underscoring the critical needs of historic areas for resilience management and identifying avenues for further research.