The concepts of resistance to unforeseen disasters and rapid post-disaster recovery of historic cities are necessary due to the earthquakes that have profoundly influenced their evolution. The improvement of this property strongly depends on the effectiveness of the preventive tools. In this work, an operational framework for the resilience assessment of a historical city characterized by high cultural and historical elements is developed, which corresponds to the main contribution of this research. The research includes multicriteria analysis based on the in-depth knowledge of the city’s historical development, the study of the effects of past earthquakes, structural vulnerability analysis of pombalino buildings, architectural types and socio-economic aspects. The aim is to obtain the necessary elements to guide an aware plan for improving resilience and the reduction of vulnerability through a GIS tool aimed at preventing and defining urban intervention priorities. The framework proposed is applied to Lisbon downtown.

As many European countries, the Portuguese territory is a region of moderate seismicity, and a large part of its building stock includes reinforced concrete (RC) buildings built before the introduction of modern seismic codes (<1983s). Currently, the Lisbon building stock is composed of 45% of RC buildings, of which 71% were built in such a construction period. Being designed to only sustain gravitational loads and without adequate lateral load resistance, these buildings are likely to be severely damaged during an earthquake. This highlights the need to propose reliable seismic risk assessment and earthquake loss models for such structures. In this context, the development of an exposure model which quantifies the building stock susceptible to be seismically damaged, in terms of structural characteristics, spatial location, and occupancy, is of major importance. The main purpose of this paper is to contribute the definition of a building exposure model for the city of Lisbon, focusing on a detailed structural characterization of these typologies. It starts with an extensive collection and analysis of design blueprints of existing buildings in two Lisbon’s neighborhoods: Alvalade and Benfica, which were found to be representative of the RC building stock in the city. Then, the information collected is scrutinized and statistically post-processed through probability distributions that provide a clear insight on the RC typologies and their structural characteristics. These results can be used in the future for the development of a numerical models and to derive fragility and vulnerability models, fundamental to conducting seismic risk analyses.