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Historic cities are irreplaceable and highly complex cultural resources that have evolved over time and contain various heritage components such as traditional housing, urban spaces, ecological features and intangible components such as rituals and social activities.

However recent decades have seen unprecedented pace of urbanization. For the first time in human history, the world urban population has exceeded its rural population. Because of internal migration, from the countryside to cities, by 2030 more than 60% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities, with record concentrations in large urban conglomerations and megacities in the developing world.

The uncontrolled and largely unplanned growth of historic cities have put increasing pressure on their urban infrastructure and has made heritage components highly vulnerable to natural hazards such as earthquakes, fire and floods. As a result, several urban disasters have taken place in recent years such as Mumbai floods of 2005, Hurricane Katrina affecting New Orleans in 2005, New Zealand Earthquake of 2010 and recent floods in Queensland in 2011 causing extensive damage to rich cultural heritage located in historic urban areas.

Therefore in order to proactively protect historic cities from disasters, mitigation measures need to be undertaken at policy, planning and technical levels through an integrated approach aimed at comprehensive risk management of urban cultural heritage. Moreover these should effectively engage various stakeholders at the city, national, regional as well as international levels for protecting cultural heritage in historic cities during such catastrophic situations. Considering these issues, the theme of the 6th UNESCO Chair International Training Course on Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage would be ‘Integrated Approach for Disaster Risk Mitigation of Historic Cities’.