Investigating the Integration of Cultural Heritage Disaster Risk Management into Urban Planning Tools. The Ravenna Case Study

Angela Rosa,Simona Tondelli,Angela Santangelo

doi:10.3390/su13020872

Abstract

As increasingly recognized by scholars, climate change is posing new challenges in the field of disaster risk management and urban planning. Even though cultural heritage has passed through decades and centuries, it has never experienced such unexpected and variable events as those forecasted by climate change for the foreseeable future, making it a sensitive element of the living environment. By selecting the city of Ravenna and the cultural heritage site of the Santa Croce Church and archaeological area as a case study, the paper aims at providing an insight into the role that urban planning tools have when it comes to improving the resilience of historical areas, coping with climate change through improvements to the disaster risk management of cultural heritage. Starting from a deep analysis of the existing spatial and urban planning tools that operate at different scales on the Ravenna territory, the adaptive capacity of the historical area toward the identified risks was assessed. The results may lead, on the one hand, to improving the integration of cultural heritage risk management into urban planning tools; on the other hand, they contribute to improving the scope and the governance of the heritage management plans in order to cope with climate change risks and their effects.

Highlights

IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
As this paper aims at investigating the integration of cultural heritage and disaster risk management into urban planning tools, additional sectoral planning tools were considered, such as the Management Plan of the UNESCO Early Christian Monuments serial site in Ravenna (PdG—Piano di Gestione dei monumenti paleocristiani di Ravenna patrimonio dell’umanità) [93] and the Municipal Civil Protection Plan
The results obtained from the assessment of the planning instrument dimension of the adaptive capacity (Table 2) did not provide an exhaustive overview of Ravenna adaptive capacity based on the current urban plan, as economic, social, political, and technological aspects should be taken into account in its formulation, they helped to identify gaps in risk management within current planning tools

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cultural heritage, which has been skillfully handed down to us through the centuries, today is dealing with an unprecedented and constantly changing climate [1,2,3,4,5]. Its effects are making the protection, management, and use of cultural heritage more challenging [6,7,8,9]. Current disaster statistics do not consider cultural heritage as a sensitive and resilient element of the living environment [10]. Policies to protect heritage from natural and anthropic risks remain fragmented, while the importance of learning from traditional best practices and knowledge for building resilience appears underestimated [11]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion