ABSTRACT
Recent catastrophic events, such as the I-35W bridge collapse, New Orleans flooding, the BP oil spill, Port au Prince's destruction by earthquake, Fukushima nuclear plant's devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street investment bank failures, and the housing foreclosure epidemic and the collapse of housing prices, all stem from what author Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design. This is design in which structures and systems have so little redundancy and so much interconnectedness and misguided efficiency that they fail completely if any one part does not perform as intended. If we, as architects, planners, engineers, and citizens are to predict and prepare for the next disaster, we need to recognize this error in our thinking and to understand how design thinking provides us with a way to anticipate unintended failures and increase the resiliency of the world in which we live.
In Designing to Avoid Disaster, the author discusses the context and cultural assumptions that have led to a number of disasters worldwide, describing the nature of fracture-critical design and why it has become so prevalent. He traces the impact of fracture-critical thinking on everything from our economy and politics to our educational and infrastructure systems to the communities, buildings, and products we inhabit and use everyday. And he shows how the natural environment and human population itself have both begun to move on a path toward a fracture-critical collapse that we need to do everything possible to avoid. We designed our way to such disasters and we can design our way out of them, with a number of possible solutions that Fisher provides.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |41 pages
The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design
chapter |6 pages
The Increasing Incidence of Disasters
chapter |5 pages
Our Planetary Ponzi Scheme
chapter |8 pages
Fracture-Critical Design
chapter |5 pages
Disasters on Demand
chapter |8 pages
The Anti-Shock Doctrine
chapter |7 pages
Redefining Success
part |103 pages
How Fracture-Critical Design Affects Our Lives
chapter |7 pages
Fracture-Critical Species
chapter |5 pages
Re-sizing the Human Footprint
chapter |6 pages
Fracture-Critical Population
chapter |7 pages
Protective Design
chapter |5 pages
Fracture-Critical Economy
chapter |4 pages
Rethinking Work
chapter |6 pages
Fracture-Critical Politics
chapter |5 pages
Reimagining Government
chapter |4 pages
Fracture-Critical Higher Education
chapter |4 pages
Redesigning the University
chapter |6 pages
Fracture-Critical Infrastructure
chapter |5 pages
Going Dutch
chapter |6 pages
Fracture-Critical Developments
chapter |7 pages
A Better Way to Dwell
chapter |7 pages
Fracture-Critical Buildings
chapter |6 pages
Designing for Durability
chapter |5 pages
Fracture-Critical Consumption
chapter |6 pages
Creative Citizen Consumption
part |82 pages
Designing to Avoid Future Disasters