Fire safety and building heritage: The occupants perspective

Current regulations and approaches to fire safety seem to be generally characterized by a schematic and deterministic point of view, especially while dealing with Building Heritage. They generally consider how interventions on buildings could be enough for reducing people’s risk, because occupants would surely behave in the correct way. Hence, massive modifications to the original building layout can be adopted (limited, e.g., to increasing number and dimensions of egress paths), while effective man-environment and man-man emergency evacuation interactions are underestimated. Starting from this issue, this chapter firstly analyses main limitations of these approaches, by focusing on human behaviors during a fire, especially in case of emergencies in historical buildings. To this end, main aspects of both significant international and national regulations and literature studies on human fire evacuation behaviors are organized and reviewed. Hence, the importance of innovative strategies, such as the ones based on the Fire Safety Engineering approach, is discussed by mainly evidencing the fundamental impact of human behavior modeling as a new tool for designing and evaluating low-impact risk-reduction solutions.