The use of historic city centers for touristic purposes, i.e. mass gatherings events (MEs), needs a multi-hazard approach which should jointly consider building heritage and hosted individuals’ emergency safety, by including effects of individuals’ behaviors to provide effective risk- reduction strategies (i.e.: interventions on critical Building Heritage; outdoor spaces layout reorganization; emergency management; wayfinding systems;). This work evidences the capabilities of such approach in case of MEs-earthquake emergency combinations, by taking advantaging of a validated evacuation simulator, through a case-study application.

Historical centres are high-risk scenarios for evacuees during earthquake emergency. Herein, the preventive identification of criticalities concerning the emergency paths is important to preserve evacuees’ and rescuers’ safety and design effective risk mitigation solutions. This study proposes new indices for the quick evaluation of paths’ vulnerability and of possible debris amounts blocking the evacuation paths within the historical centre. Furthermore, starting from the obtained indices, the study produces probabilistic risk maps of the centre useful before and after emergency to plan the safe paths for evacuees and rescuers, design emergency operations and resource allocation.

Cognitive Systems can be applied in architectural spaces to improve Built Environment performances basing on users’ needs. They can: 1) jointly monitor environmental conditions and human behaviours through Cognitive Built Environment (CBE) components; 2) use human-environment interaction models and related Key Performance Indicators to detect critical situations; 3) adapt CBE devices status to inform users on how to properly behave. This approach is applied to safety performances of outdoor (earthquake) and indoor (fire) scenarios, by proposing and testing solutions to support evacuees while reaching safe areas and rescuers’ support.