AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

For various decades, countless natural threats —particularly hurricanes— have assailed Puerto Rican built heritage. Even in recent years, the effects of climate change have increased the intensity of these phenomena. Besides all the havoc, the recurrence of these events threatens the conservation of built heritage. However, climate change is not the sole risk factor for historic properties. Factors such as planning and preservation policy, urban development, and financial stability further exacerbate the vulnerability of historic buildings in Puerto Rico. As a potential step forward, vulnerability assessments are a proper tool to understand the vulnerability of historic sites from climate change vis-à-vis these external factors. Vulnerability assessments (VAs) generally allow exploring how ecosystems, communities, and historic properties are vulnerable to a changing climate. In the long-term process, VAs help identify potential mitigation and adaptation measures that contribute to decreasing vulnerability and protecting resources for long-term resiliency. Nevertheless, most of these existing tools focus on a particular historic resource and its specific conditions. This approach complicates the possibility of applying a protocol on a larger scale to other historic sites and resources because it overlooks the socioeconomic, cultural, and political histories, decisions, and processes that can aggravate the vulnerability of an overall region.

Considering the strengths and limitations of the existing heritage-focused tools, this paper proposes an alternative and experimental framework for VAs that addresses how general external factors beyond the particularities of a specific historic site can further influence the vulnerability of historic properties of an overall region. The methodological alternative is based on a multidisciplinary analysis of the geographical and historical complexities of the Central Aguirre Historic District in the southeastern municipality of Salinas in Puerto Rico, a former sugar mill company town that functioned from 1899 to 1990. A set of overarching questions about Puerto Rican history and the historic district’s conditions led to the development of the alternative VA protocol, composed of different indicators and criteria that range from policy, economy, conditions, and social issues. This proposal facilitates the calculation of the climatic vulnerability of Puerto Rican built heritage in general, quantifying the vulnerability of historic properties vis-à-vis environmental, political, sociocultural, and historical conditions in the archipelago. An applied protocol test with twenty properties out of the over four hundred properties of the historic district demonstrated how varied circumstances (such as ownership, current conditions, materials, and use of incentives) can sway the vulnerability of historic properties despite exposure to climatic risks. In the end, this result captures how the proposed framework can respond to the environmental and historical particularities of the archipelago when trying to understand the vulnerability of historic properties regardless of their location.