Resilience of historic cities and adaptation to climate change

Abstract

In recent years the interest for the resilience of cities and historic urban centers is growing. Climate change is one of the challenges of this century and it is having a great impact on the society and economy of cities and buildings. According to climate change scenarios cities will have to face frequent extreme events in the future years, like droughts, heat waves, abundant precipitations or snowfalls. However, there are little studies that try to analyze the effects from different points of view and to find a solution that can have an impact on buildings, the town environment as well as on the well being of the society. Therefore this article proposes a complex assessment and intervention strategy based on the case study of Oravita, a small mountain town from the western part of Romania, that will improve the resilience of the town trough a multidisciplinary approach. The aim is to understand and to adapt the historic town to the contemporary climatic needs by an interdisciplinary holistic understanding of the context through different professional views: architectural, landscape architecture, historical, engineering, social, economical and geographical.

Keywords

• historic cities
• urban resilience
• mitigation
• climate change
• multidisciplinary