PRESCRIPTIVE CODES VS. PERFORMANCE-BASED CODES: WHICH ONE IS THE BEST FIRE SAFETY CODE FOR THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT?

In Brazil, the fire safety codes are based on a prescriptive approach; however a considerable number of fire accidents have shown that these codes might not have been providing the fire safety as they should have. In fact, nowadays, most developed countries, such as some North-European countries (like the UK and Sweden), Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada and Japan have already started to change their fire safety codes from a prescriptive approach to a performance-based one. The performance-based codes attempt to provide clearer guidance than the prescriptive codes taking into consideration the actual growing complexity of the architectural designs, which introduces more fire risks. This is one of the main reasons why most of the mentioned countries are in an advanced stage of development and implementation of performance-based codes. Nevertheless, in the Brazilian context, many difficulties are found for the implementation and development of such types of fire safety codes. Some of these difficulties which could be mentioned are: the perception of the fire risks and the laws. Both of them are considered the crucial barriers for the development and implementation of performance-based codes. In reality, these two issues can be associated with what here has been called here as "fire safety culture". Furthermore, the objective of this paper is to promote the discussion on "which is the best practice for fire safety in Brazil: the prescriptive codes or the performance-based ones?"