A Framework for Linking Community-Resilience Goals to Specific Performance Targets for the Built Environment

Abstract

An important task in the effort to improve the resilience of communities to both natural and manmade disasters involves rethinking the current approach for designing individual components within the built environment. In the United States, a patchwork of building codes and engineering standards results in a set of performance objectives for individual components that is often inadequate with respect to the broad principles of resilience. This paper outlines a conceptual framework that can be used to explicitly link community-level resilience goals to specific design targets for individual systems and components within the built environment. It then presents a proof-of-concept example that demonstrates how to derive a consistent performance target for individual residential buildings from a community-level resilience goal. Lastly, it discusses potential applications of the proposed framework, including a critical evaluation of current building codes to verify whether their target performance objectives are compatible with community-level resilience goals.