Development of a Tool for Assessing Commercial Building Resilience

Abstract

Built environment resilience is becoming a more established concept, although there are no schemes yet devised to comprehensively measure building resilience from the point of view of a commercial building owner. For a commercial building owner, ‘building resilience’ can be defined as the ability to protect, maintain, or restore the functionality of, value of, and income generated by a building after a damaging event or circumstance within a prescribed time frame. There is a need to measure the resilience of individual buildings to help owners make better decisions and protect their assets, to better assess the built environment resilience of larger geographic units such as communities and cities, and to complement existing assessments of building sustainability. Based on a conceptual examination of resilience measurement and a review of the literature and other resources, this study develops a new resilience assessment tool: the Australian Resilience Measurement Scheme for buildings (ARMS). The scheme adopts resilience as a holistic concept incorporating physical, infrastructural, environmental, economic–social, political–regulatory, and organisational resilience, and is rated according to dimensions, subdimensions, and items scored on a points system. The scheme will allow the aspects in which a building is performing well or poorly to be identified as well as give an overall resilience rating. This paper also examines the lessons to be learned from sustainability assessment tools for measuring and assessing resilience in terms of tool structure, the weightings of items and dimensions, item measurability, whether items are performance based or feature based, and benchmarking. The tool is its infancy, and work to further develop it is continuing. As has occurred with the assessment of building sustainability, the assessment of building resilience will increase in importance to stakeholders of the built environment.