Fostering the resilience of heritage buildings in New Zealand: Potentialities of decision support systems

Abstract

The 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence (CES) in New Zealand, and further recent earthquake events worldwide, has shown the invaluable loss that earthquakes can cause to architectural heritage. This paper explores the potentiality and the extent to which Decision Support Systems (DSSs) might have on informing the decision making processes towards thriving the resilience of heritage buildings to natural hazards, with special focus on earthquakes. In particular, in the paper, reference is made to RiskScape, the New Zealand DSS platform for assessing the risks from natural hazards, where the possibility to assess the seismic vulnerability of heritage buildings and to prove the effectiveness of different mitigation options, at territorial scale, has been already embedded, as far as churches are concerned. The idea would be to include further add-ins to RiskScape to contribute towards an ambitious initiative aiming to enhance the seismic resilience of heritage buildings in New Zealand. In this paper, the idea to include in RiskScape, as a first step, a database to foster the awareness of stakeholders and communities on their Cultural Heritage at risk, is firstly discuss. The already embedded RiskScape add-in that allows performing scenario analysis at territorial scale to assess direct and indirect impacts is then illustrated. Finally, a further add-in that enables the analysis at single building level to identify the most likely collapse mechanisms is illustrated. This could support the identification of effective mitigation strategies pre-event and of emergency management and repair/reconstruction strategies, post-event.