The devastating Gorkha earthquake in 2015 killed and injured thousands and destroyed local infrastructure within Nepal. It also damaged or destroyed many of the monuments within the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of the Kathmandu Valley, affecting livelihoods. In support of a Durham-led British Academy/ GCRF Cities & Infrastructure project (‘Reducing Disaster Risk to Life and Livelihoods by Evaluating the Seismic Safety of Kathmandu’s Historic Urban Infrastructure’), we used methods developed within the AHRC ‘Fragmented Heritage/ Curious Travellers’ project to virtually reconstruct monuments that had collapsed, in order to help conservation architects in their reconstruction efforts. With a lack of measured survey data or plans we deployed mobile mapping technology to document the remaining townscape heritage and scale 3D models of these monuments within the Durbar squares of the city.
