Assessing fire resilience of historic districts: An approach combining space structure and tourists’ behavior

The fire risk of historical districts is a huge challenge faced by all countries in the world when protecting historical and cultural heritage. As the historic districts are transformed into commercial districts nowadays, increasing tourists and businessmen start to visit and move into these districts, it is more urgent to deal with the fire risks with the growing demand of fire and electricity. Accurate assessment of the fire resilience and targeted implementation of resilience improvement actions are considered to be an effective way to solve this problem. However, the existing research has not fully considered the complex effects of space structure, tourists' behavior and the interaction between them on fire resilience. Therefore, this study constructed a fire resilience assessment framework combining space structure and tourists' behavior, and considering the spatial-behavior interaction. The results revealed that the space structure of commercial historical districts and the behavior of tourists show different characteristics and regulars in our study area, such as the categories of shops using open fires, the location of open fires and the periodicity of tourists ' behavior over time. By taking an experimental verification in Ciqikou Historic district, Chongqing, China, this assessment framework showed a flexible scale of application with strong operability and versatility, which also evidenced that space structure and tourists' behavior must be taken into account simultaneously to improve the fire resilience of historical districts. At last, we proposed targeted strategies to improve the fire resilience from the aspects of space structure and tourists' behavior, respectively.