| dc.description.abstract | Community-level resilience has become an important consideration for city planners, policymakers, and other decision-makers, and therefore, it is increasingly investigated by engineering researchers. The robustness of the built environment and interconnectedness of the social system are important factors affecting community-level resilience that need further investigation. Recent research and studies show a need for the buildings to stay operational to preserve the quality of life after a disruptive event [Sattar et al. (2018)]. Disasters cause significant disruption to social institutions, the local economy, and overall quality of life due to damage to buildings and other civil infrastructures. Understanding the relationship amongst different community functions mainly between buildings and organizations, is a significant part of the motivation behind this research. There are seven types of capital inherent in a community: financial, political, social, human, cultural, natural, and built [Flora et al. (2008)]. This work advances the current state of knowledge in the relationship between buildings (a subset of built capital) and organizations throughout a community through a novel quantitative framework based on the seven community capitals. This thesis proposes a two-tiered approach, where one tier is performed at a community-level, and other tier is performed at a building-level and then integrated to measure post-disaster community capital losses. The community-level losses were measured using a novel scoring system based on keywords defining each community capital capturing changes in each community capital induced by building damage. The second tier measures building-level losses including number of damaged buildings as a proxy for built capital, dislocation rates for social capital, morbidity rates for human capital, accessibility changes for political capital, and repair costs for financial capital. The framework is exemplified on a virtual community, Centerville, under an earthquake scenario. Centerville is comprised of multiple building types with varying robustness [Ellingwood et al. (2016)]. Occupancies that are used to assemble the building inventory of Centerville include residential, commercial and industrial, as well as critical facilities such as hospitals, fire stations, schools, and government offices modeled using 16 building archetypes. The community is also comprised of a synthetic population with varied attributes linked to social vulnerability and resilience. The framework presented is hazard-generic, however for demonstration the hazard considered for this thesis is seismic and is adapted from Lin and Wang (2016). Disaster impact measurements are examined across the building portfolio for the earthquake scenario at different points in time to support comparisons. Although earthquake demand and some measures of community capital remain ill-defined, the proposed framework demonstrates the relative importance of including community capitals in loss estimation models to calculate community-level performance and resilience objectives. Resulting community capital measures, which aid community decision makers in either mitigation plans or as part of post-disaster response and recovery efforts post-disaster, are provided using a community capital ‘dashboard’. A dashboard presents trade-offs for supporting decision makers in understanding how changes to characteristics of the community can enhance or inhibit community resilience. Additionally, a dashboard enables the user to see the trade-offs across multiple criteria that influence community resilience, as opposed to a single measure that may be too vague for a decision maker to understand. The purpose of this work is to aid community decision makers in either mitigation plans or to aid in response and recovery efforts post-disaster through a holistic view of disaster impacts on their community. | |
