Fatemeh Mehdizadeh Saradj,
Volume 0, Issue 2 (6-2011)
Abstract
Iran is located in a high-risk seismic zone of earthquakes. It has thousands of valuable historic buildings, mostly made of
unreinforced masonry, which is quite vulnerable to natural hazards, especially earthquakes. The conservation and seismic
upgrading of these buildings is vital for their survival. However, resources are limited and some sort of prioritization is needed
in order to allocate the budget. There are several factors, which should be considered when ranking heritage buildings, but this
paper mainly focuses on the values of historic buildings and describes a survey undertaken to find out whether it is possible to
rank them. The method applied is choosing a particular group of people and determine whether they can classify buildings into
a hierarchy? The results showed that most people could perform this task, so some sort of hierarchy exists, although different
groups might choose different hierarchies.
