Architecture and Disaster Risk Reduction
Design
By Dr Peter Williams chairs ARISE-US. His background includes 30 years in IBM, where he became an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and extensive experience in creating DRR tools such as the UN City Disaster Resilience Scorecard and its many offshoots, now used by hundreds of cities (and countries) globally. His PhD is in Politics.
As well as determining the look and feel of the built environment in ways that affect our physical and mental health, architecture has a dramatic impact on the vulnerability of communities to disasters. Land zoning and codes may determine where communities spring up and how they are laid out. Buildings can be engineered to be more or less resilient to hurricanes, earthquake or other perils. But how those buildings are architected will enable different engineering strategies, choices of materials (and levels of cost); it will determine levels of sustainability, so reducing or avoiding contributions to climate change in ways that exacerbate many of those perils in the first place; and not least, it will present the engineered structure in ways that its users and the community around it will embrace and feel good about.
Architecture is thus a critical component of community sustainability and resilience, even if it isn't always recognized as such. The influence that it has will not be as instant as, say, creating new storm shelters or framing a better emergency plan - after all, it usually takes years to conceive, design, finance, permit and construct (or retrofit) a building. But the long run impact may be almost as pervasive as the historical factors that determined where a town or city was located in the first place. The design of buildings which will then be present in the community for many years determines, as well as the look of the community, the level of "in-built" or "embedded" physical resilience. This in turn greatly affects economic resilience - FEMA reports that for every dollar spent on resilient home design for example, six dollars can be saved when hazards strike. And not least, architects can have an impact in informing discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of different community planning and engineering strategies and their impact on sustainability and resilience.
Farsighted communities are thinking beyond resilience as just immediate disaster response, instead seeing it as a way of life and doing business and embracing sustainability as one of the major pathways to that resilience. Architects therefore need to be at the table alongside the planning and engineering disciplines, helping communities create sustainable and resilient buildings and neighborhoods, and map out their long term future.
For these reasons, ARISE-US is delighted to support the establishment by architect Steve Sunderman and others of a Resilient Design Collaborative, to enable the sharing of best practices and build awareness of the full role of architecture in disaster risk reduction. The Collaborative has the following terms of reference:
Vision: All building projects are designed to create resilient and sustainable communities.
Mission: Work collaboratively with the building design and construction community to promote and create resilient projects that resist, absorb, recover from or successfully adapt to manmade and natural hazards.
Action Plan 1: Organize a group or multiple groups of architects to meet (virtually or in person) to discuss means and methods to implement best resilient design strategies for their actual projects.
Action Plan 2: Create a library of case studies for others to reference as examples to guide their project design.
Action Plan 3: Expand network of AEC professionals to collaborate and create resilient high-performance buildings and infrastructure projects
ARISE-US looks forward to working with the Collaborative to enable the full integration of architecture into disaster risk reduction. If you would like to participate, please contact Steve Sunderman or myself, Peter Williams.
