Resilience: Communities Are More Than a Portfolio of Buildings

The concept of resilience has moved the structural engineering community from thinking of the survival of individual buildings to the role of buildings in the community. Performance-based design of buildings includes consideration of the damage levels associated with various hazards, as well as the impact of building damage on community performance, both in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, and during the recovery phase. This paper examines various definitions of resilience, and how some of them can be quantified. It discusses the relationship of individual buildings and the community portfolio, and the importance of community aspects that are not normally considered by engineers, such as social vulnerability and economic impact. The paper includes a discussion of multifaceted losses such as business characteristics.