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The rapid growth of tourism has significantly threatened the function and form of historical towns. The combination of closely spatial buildings, high fire loads, and commercialization—factors that trigger fire initiation and propagation—has made historical towns more vulnerable to fire hazards (Garcia-Castillo et al., 2023). Furthermore, the large influx of tourists disrupts local inhabitants’ daily use of communal space and creates competition for limited evacuation resources. As a result, multi-group evacuation behavior in historical towns is marked by panic and crowd-following, leading to inefficient emergency responses (Sabashi et al., 2022).
This study is conducted in Zhouzhuang, a historical town in the Jiangnan cultural region of China (Culture Zhouzhuang, 2019). Listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, it has rich cultural heritages from the Qing Dynasty and retains its traditional river street constitution and cultural context largely intact. The historical town not only faces the challenge of over-tourism, accommodating more than 5.5 million tourists annually, but also encounters safety challenges brought by contemporary urban life. Unregulated commercial expansion along the streets has disrupted traditional fire control mechanisms, leading to increased congestion and evacuation times. Additionally, the major historical streets, characterized by narrow and homogeneous spatial nature, restrict pedestrian flow and makes unassisted evacuation more difficult (Tanachawengsakul et al., 2016).
The importance of in historical town's street interventions to influence multi-group evacuation efficiency is emphasized in the literature. The historical streets play a crucial role in ensuring historical authenticity and spatial integrity while also ensuring multiple safe pedestrian evacuation pathfinding options, which have the potential to minimize disruptions to the coherence of the historical fabric and its environment and maximize fire safety for people (ICOMOS, 2011; Viderman et al., 2023; Bernardini et al., 2016). However, most studies merely focus on assessing fire vulnerability rather than integrating fire prevention measures with heritage conservation. This gap has led to poorly designed interventions that fragment spatial fabric structures, weaken historical identity, and reduce the quality of life for inhabitants.
This study aims to explore the relationship between pedestrian density, street interventions, and emergency evacuation pathfinding. We employ a mixed-methods approach, integrating measurement-based and simulation-based techniques through three key components: a literature review, field surveys, and spatial analysis. The methodology follows three stages: (1) a systematic investigation of the historical town’s streets, assessing spatial utilization and multi-group cognitive behavior; (2) identification of factors influencing evacuation dynamics, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to construct evacuation spatial pattern maps; and (3) precise pedestrian density measurements and multi-scenario fire evacuation simulations in NetLogo, incorporating the social force model and individual pathfinding preferences. The analysis focuses on three core issues: (1) how street space utilization affects crowd distribution and spatial perception; (2) how the morphological and visual characteristics of the street network influence pedestrian flow and evacuation duration; and (3) how different groups can be appropriately allocated optimal evacuation paths and times under structured fire control unit boundaries and conditions. Preliminary findings indicate that as commercialization intensifies, connected streets increasingly constrain each other, leading to an exponential rise in evacuation times. When pedestrian density exceeds 0.7 persons/m², around 20% of tourists in these streets may need to wait and reroute through alternative fire control units. By optimizing commercial point-of-interest (POI) distribution and intelligently managing evacuation pathways within designated fire control units, multi-group evacuation efficiency can be significantly improved.
Thus, this study explores whether interventions in historical streets can improve fire evacuation safety and whether improved commercial spatial layout and pathfinding guidance can mitigate evacuation constraints in historical towns. The findings contribute to a scalable and replicable evacuation mapping framework tailored for tourism-driven historical areas.
References
[1]Garcia-Castillo, E., Paya-Zaforteza, I., & Hospitaler, A. (2023). Fire in heritage and historic buildings, a major challenge for the 21st century. Developments in the Built Environment, 13, 100102.
[2]Sabashi, K., Ben-Moshe, B., Schmöcker, J. D., Hadas, Y., & Nakao, S. (2022). Simulation of tourists’ wayfinding during evacuation based on experiments in Kyoto. Transportation research procedia, 62, 640-647.
[3]Culture Zhouzhuang. (2019). Introduction to Zhouzhuang. Zhouzhuang Tourism Official Website. http://zhouzhuang.net/index.php?c=article&a=type&tid=167
[4]Tanachawengsakul, T., Mishima, N., & Fuchikami, T. (2016). A simulation study on fire evacuation routes in primary stage for a historic canal residential area. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 216, 492-502.
[5]ICOMOS, U. (2011). The Valletta principles for the safeguarding and management of historic cities, towns and urban areas. Principles, as adopted by the 17th ICOMOS General Assembly.
[6]Viderman, T., Geddes, I., & Psathiti, C. (2023). Lived Urban Form: Using Urban Morphology to Explore Social Dimensions of Urban Space. The Journal of Public Space, 8(3), 79-92.
[7]Bernardini, G., Azzolini, M., D’Orazio, M., & Quagliarini, E. (2016). Intelligent evacuation guidance systems for improving fire safety of Italian-style historical theatres without altering their architectural characteristics. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 22, 1006-1018.
| Keywords | street intervention; multi-Group evacuation; historical town; fire safety; commercial layout |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
