Community-Resilience-Based Design of the Built Environment

Abstract

Current design codes and standards in the United States focus on the design of individual facilities and do not account for other coupled physical and nonphysical infrastructure. This does not provide a direct mechanism to enable the design of resilient communities since one network may depend on another and social and economic institutions are then adversely affected. Therefore, in this study, the current approach for designing individual physical components within a community is reimagined such that it not only considers the performance of a component individually after a damaging event but also considers the consequences its design has on other physical and nonphysical parts of the community. In this regard, a methodology was developed that links the performance of components within the built environment to community-level resilience goals by considering the dependencies and cross-dependencies for networks. This methodology enables disaggregation of the community-level objectives into a set of performance targets for the components of the built environment. The methodology presented herein can be implemented in risk-informed decision-making tools to design master-planned resilient communities as well as upgrade a community’s buildings and/or networked infrastructure to make the community more resilient to future disasters. This could be used, for example, to understand how to better isolate or decouple two or more sectors, establish redundancies, or decide whether to focus on retrofitting schools in the public sector, businesses, and residences in the private sector, or (more likely) some combination thereof.