1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Urban historic centers, represented by unreinforced stone and brick masonry structures constructed before the introduction of a more demanding seismic design code, are important part of the cultural heritage. Beside their cultural-historic value, they usually represent important economic and touristic centers. Encouraged by a substantial increase in tourism, the authorities have often carried out a series of renovation works, usually being pursued either on a too superficial or on a too intrusive way, in which little respect is shown by existent materials and construction techniques. Consequently, the vulnerability assessment of historic masonry buildings in a given urban area, is a key prerequisite for evaluating global risk. The considered vulnerability index method, obtained by the calculation of a score for a building as weighted sum of characteristic parameters related to the building’s seismic response and distributed into vulnerability classes, represents an innovative hybrid methodology for bridging the gap between empirical and analytical methods providing initial seismic vulnerability assessment by using simplified scoring method. The knowledge gained through reviewing the available literature on seismic vulnerability assessment of historical centers, has been used to set-up of vulnerability index method, harmonized with the specific characteristics of urban historic centers in N. Macedonia. The paper will present selecting the specific independent parameters, characteristic for the urban historic center in the old part of the city of Skopje, capital of N. Macedonia, and establishing the relation between the chosen specific parameters and the vulnerability class levels for each of them, as well as calibration od the weight parameter by ranging the importance of each of the parameters using data from the screening of 15 historic buildings after the 2016 Skopje earthquake.