Ancient Town Walls at Risk: Methods, Technologies, and Tools for Multi-hazard Risk Analysis, Monitoring, and Governance

Ancient town walls played a critical role in shaping local identities and hold great potential as cultural resources but pose substantial challenges in management terms. In the last decade, many failure events occurred in these constructions, highlighting the need to prioritise interventions and establish a systematic strategy for disaster risk reduction. This chapter presents the main criticalities and research activities for the town walls located in Tuscany, Italy. Initially attributed only to extreme climatic events, a closer study of the collapsed town walls revealed a more complex situation wherein the slow-onset hazards and human-induced threats contributed to the degradation of the materials and structures. The procedure adopts a systemic approach in organising processes, from the territorial scale to the more minute scale of individual elements, allowing for multi-level risk prioritisation, preventive conservation, monitoring, and maintenance. Specific innovative tools like AI software and a GIS platform were tested to investigate rapidly and effectively the properties and risks of the walled circuits, as well as to manage interventions. Overall, the tools are expected to facilitate a shared understanding of the risk conditions among the multiple stakeholders engaged in protecting town walls and enable an effective decision-making process for planned preventive conservation.