Resilience of art cities to flood risk: A quantitative model based on depth‐idleness correlation

Abstract

Cultural heritage (CH) is threatened by floods; however, the understanding of exposure and vulnerability is challenging and makes risk and resilience assessment rarely practiced. CH is crucial for post-disaster resilience, especially when the local economy is based on tourism. The work presents a novel framework for evaluating flood resilience, indirect impacts, and associated risk in art cities. The exposure of CH is estimated using the number of visitors as a proxy variable for the social appreciation. A new depth-idleness vulnerability function assigning a reopening time to flood depth is developed from post-event reports. A resilience model is conceived to (i) describe the recovery dynamics, (ii) estimate the indirect impacts in terms of lost visitors to CH for different probabilistic scenarios, (iii) calculate risk, and (iv) identify mitigation actions. The application of the model to the art city of Florence (Italy), a UNESCO site visited by approximately 10 million people a year, shows that a medium recurrence interval flood requires a recovery time of 351 days and causes a loss of 10.5 million visitors. The annual average number of lost visitors is 88,000 approximately. Resilience can be increased by accelerating the reopening and by reinforcing the attractivity of the city.

An Integrated Multidimensional Resilience Index for urban areas prone to flash floods: Development and validation

“…Regarding the cultural dimension, the most resilient municipalities have wellpreserved cultural assets and support for cultural activities. Tourism and commercial activities related to cultural heritage can bring considerable sums of money into municipal coffers; therefore, well-preserved cultural assets can assist in the recovery capacity of urban areas (Arrighi et al, 2022). Cultural events can also strengthen social cohesiveness and the community's resilience to flash floods (Hernández-Morcillo et al, 2013).…”

“…Thus, these areas should improve the protection of their cultural heritage by extending a buffer area around them as much as feasible and boosting the promotion of their cultural assets to raise tourist attractiveness, which would also provide indirect economic benefits (Arrighi et al, 2022).…”

A Global Scale Analysis of River Flood Risk of UNESCO World Heritage Sites

“…The value of natural environments is also widely recognized but again intangible and hardly monetizable. Existing literature on flood risk of cultural heritage has not proposed yet a solution for valuing flood exposure, however Arrighi et al (2022), proposed the use of the number of visitors as a proxy value to rank social appreciation of single cultural attractions at the city scale.…”

Evaluation of the vulnerability and resilience towards urban flash floods in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

“…Consequences of natural hazards have been increasing in recent decades [1] and floods are among the most frequent and damaging events worldwide [2]. In the last decades, Malaysia has increasingly experienced extreme weather events, characterised by days of high temperature, high rainfall, dry spells, thunderstorms and strong winds [3].…”