Prioritization of historic buildings based on their values

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.