Maintenance, reconstruction and prevention for the regeneration of historic towns and centers

Natural phenomena often anthropically induced render our territory vulnerable. The task of today’s society is to minimise risks and guarantee maximum safety within the territory while safeguarding the natural as well as a built landscape. The components of the latter comprise not only new but also existing constructions, which are often the most fragile and whose casual and uncontrolled transformations have compromised their initial safety. From the 1970s onwards, following some calamitous national and international seismic events, intense research activities succeed in developing various tools to provide precise and apposite operational approaches to the construction of new buildings and to draw up guidelines for restoring earthquake damaged buildings. Moreover, society’s awareness of the question is now such as to require detailed and precise policies from administrators as well as policies to promote the overall safety of the natural and built landscape. For example, in the past forty years carefully-thought out and scientifically-based antiseismic regulations have been introduced that not only require the maximum safety but also insist on the adaptive reuse of the cultural, landscape, social and economic identity of highly fragile architectures that risk disappearing in the event of an earthquake. From this standpoint it is apparent that in order to achieve the maximum reduction in a territory’s seismic risk it is necessary to implement careful prevention measures. However, this requires an interaction between various skills, ranging from seismology to seismic engineering, from territorial planning to sociology and architectural design. Through seismic safety objectives, sustainability and habitability can be achieved. Buoyed by the slogan that prevention must be performed before reconstruction, our intention is to examine an operational practice that reduces seismic risk and consequently enhances the safety of the city.