Rethinking earthquake-related vulnerabilities of historic centres in Italy: Insights from the Tuscan area

Earthquakes pose a looming threat to human life and habitats, as well as the large-scale preservation of urban cultural heritage assets located in historic centres. These areas, worldwide perceived as cultural, social and economic resources for communities, are experiencing a progressive decline and deterioration. In the last decades, a series of seismic events caused considerable casualties and irreversible damage to historic centres in Italy, with permanent loss of many severely damaged cultural assets that could not be fully recovered or replaced. This problem underlines the need of undertaking further proactive measures to limit the impact of any potential earthquake on urban cultural heritage in historic centres. The characterisation of vulnerability in its multiple dimensions is a key issue for the effective implementation of vulnerability reduction and mitigation actions. This paper contests the enacting of seismic risk reduction programmes that are mainly based on the estimation of physical vulnerabilities and do not account for non-physical ones. The discussion is based on the Pressure and Release model that represents the progression of vulnerability in terms of unsafe conditions, dynamic pressures and root causes. The study refers to the historic centres in the Region of Tuscany (Italy) and considers a wider perspective on physical, socio-economic and institutional vulnerabilities. The results allows for outlining the agenda for action for risk reduction and establishing a set of mitigation strategies on the basis of the expected impacts of seismic events on historic centres. Intervention measures are integrated into the current framework for disaster risk reduction and aim to overcome the building-focused approach towards a large-scale systematic one.