Multidisciplinary Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Heritage Urban Centres: From Building Typologies to Urban Resilience

Historic urban centres concentrate vulnerable building stocks, critical urban functions, and high cultural value within dense, morphologically complex fabrics. Yet, seismic risk assessment still focuses predominantly on single buildings or purely structural indicators, often underestimating systemic vulnerabilities and heritage significance. This contribution proposes a multidisciplinary framework for seismic vulnerability assessment at the scale of heritage urban centres, integrating structural fragility, urban morphology, exposure, and conservation value into a unified, map‑based methodology. The approach combines: (i) building‑by‑building survey and typological classification, (ii) empirical vulnerability indices, (iii) urban‑scale indicators such as street network configuration, parcel patterns, and (iv) weighting of cultural significance to support priority setting for risk‑mitigation measures. The methodology is applied to a historic city‑centre case study located in the western part of Romania, in an area with shallow earthquakes, producing spatial vulnerability scenarios that highlight critical clusters, potential damage distribution across the proposed cultural promenade, and conflicts between structural risk and heritage value. Results show that considering only structural aspects yields intervention priorities different from those when urban configuration and cultural importance are explicitly included, with direct implications for emergency planning and resource allocation. The author argues for closer collaboration between earthquake engineering, architecture, urban planning, conservation, and social sciences, and outlines how such integrated assessments can inform urban policies aimed at enhancing both seismic resilience and quality of life in heritage cities.