Toward Resilient Communities: A Performance-Based Engineering Framework for Design and Evaluation of the Built Environment.

摘要

A community is a dynamic system of people, organizations, and patterned relationships and interactions. Most of these relationships and interactions are physically supported by a community's built environment, a complex and interdependent network of engineered subsystems and components, including buildings, bridges, pipelines, transmission towers, and other structures. As a result, the built environment plays a crucial role in enabling a community to function successfully, providing the foundations for much of the economic and social activities that characterize a modern society. Natural hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods can damage a community's built environment, which in turn can disrupt the security, economy, safety, health, and welfare of the public. In response, many communities have developed and implemented regulatory frameworks to ensure that individual parts of the built environment attain minimum levels of performance. This report proposes a performance-based engineering framework for design and evaluation of the built environment in order to improve the overall resilience of communities to natural hazards. It begins by examining the regulatory framework currently used in the United States to design and evaluate a community's built environment to withstand the effects of earthquakes and other natural hazards. Specifically, it analyzes building codes and other engineering standards that establish performance expectations for buildings and lifelines. To this end, the report first identifies attributes or characteristics of an ideal regulatory framework. Then, using these attributes as a guide, it discusses both the strengths and shortcomings of the current regulatory framework. The most significant shortcoming of the current framework is its lack of an integrated, coordinated, and comprehensive approach to establishing performance expectations for individual components of the built environment.