What Makes for a Seismically Resilient Urban Society?

Abstract eng:
This paper describes the first part of a study into what affects a community’s ability to live with earthquakes. The basic premise of the study is that, important though they are, technical factors are not the only contributors to success in living with earthquakes, and many other factors (social, cultural, political) are also involved. The study so far has done nothing to suggest that this basic premise is false. The study has been conducted to date by carrying out discussions with the author’s friends and colleagues, and by a week spent in Kathmandu 6 months after the April 2015 Nepal earthquake, talking a wide variety of people involved in the earthquake response. Future plans include visits to Christchurch (New Zealand), Los Angeles and Santiago de Chile to carry out similar exercises there. Travel grants have been generously provided by three UK engineering organisations – SECED 1 and EEFIT 2 and the Institution of Civil Engineers R&D enabling fund 3. The eventual goal of the study is to assist earthquake engineers in thinking more clearly about how the broader, nontechnical context in which they operate might influence both the technical solutions they develop, and the means of reaching those solutions. The conclusions will be presented by the author at the Institution of Civil Engineers on 31st May 2017 as the 16th Mallet-Milne lecture, organised by SECED, and published as a special issue of the Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering.

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