Community Capitals Framework for Linking Buildings and Organizations for Enhancing Community Resilience through the Built Environment

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to define a quantitative measurement system capable of capturing multiple dimensions of a community impacted by disaster. The multiple dimensions of a community are defined here as the seven community capitals inherent to any community, namely, financial, political, social, human, cultural, natural, and built capitals. A two-pronged approach is proposed, where one prong relates organizations to community capitals using a novel scoring system aligned with the definition of each community capital, and the other prong relates building-damage consequences to the community capitals, including number of damaged buildings for built capital, household dislocation for social capital, morbidity rates for human capital, accessibility changes for political capital, and repair costs for financial capital. The framework is exemplified on a virtual community, Centerville, under an earthquake scenario. The example demonstrates that the proposed approach for quantifying capitals provides useful measures of disaster impacts and can readily inform risk-based decision making.