Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) Supported Material Passport for Sustainable Urban Heritage Conservation: Case Study of Massawa, Eritrea

Decarbonizing the built environment through circular economy concepts requires increasing attention in rehabilitating heritage buildings to accommodate ever-changing human needs for a sustainable future. Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) is a fitting approach for rehabilitating heritage buildings, allowing precise reconstruction of building models and comprehensive tracking of material information. However, at the building system level, digital material passports have yet to be developed for heritage buildings. This paper demonstrates the advantages of incorporating a building-level material passport within the HBIM model. This integration facilitates systematic management of heritage buildings, aids rehabilitation planning, and advances the digitization of material information for heritage structures. We proposed a model to develop an HBIM-supported material passport for the historic port city of Massawa, Eritrea. Results show that despite data acquisition and processing challenges, the HBIM-supported material passport facilitates sustainable urban heritage conservation through effective and holistic documentation. Moreover, it enables proactive decision-making, retrofit/ refurbishment/renovation planning, demolition planning, defect detection, and disaster management. Integrating material passports within HBIM will additionally furnish structured qualitative and quantitative data (e.g., embedded values, aesthetics, cultural identity) on heritage buildings. This will substantially improve the quality of heritage conservation in information-deprived contexts, such as in developing countries, as currently available information on heritage building material is fragmented, incomplete, and inconsistent.