A Multi-Scale Resilience Framework for Cultural Heritage Preservation: Application to the Riga Central Market

Cultural heritage structures represent distinctive historical and cultural values, requiring preservation approaches that safeguard their authenticity while addressing natural and anthropogenic hazards. To sustain their functionality and significance, it is essential to design interventions that enhance their ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from disruptions. This study applies a multi-scale framework to assess resilience-enabling interventions for cultural heritage preservation. The framework integrates risk assessment, building-scale resilience assessment through four Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), namely reliability, robustness, resourcefulness, and recovery, and urbanscale assessment through the UNDRR Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities Cultural Heritage addendum. It is demonstrated through a case study of the Riga Central Market in Riga, Latvia, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The results identify heavy precipitation as the dominant climate-related hazard and show that the proposed buildingscale interventions, based on strengthening, repair, and monitoring measures that comply with heritage preservation requirements, improve the current resilience, as measured by the KPIs. The urban-scale assessment reveals critical gaps in preparedness, coordination, response, and recovery capacity, and supports the definition of interventions related to emergency and recovery planning, risk-informed prioritization, and institutional organization and financing mechanisms. Overall, the findings highlight the value of combining building-scale and urban-scale perspectives to support more informed decisions for the long-term preservation and functioning of cultural heritage assets.

Keywords: Cultural heritage resilience, Risk assessment, Resilience indicators, Resourcefulness, Recovery.