ABSTRACT
Many domains of inquiries and activities nowadays broadly use resilience to imply a number of different things. This can also induce potential confusion, particularly in the context of achieving communities resilient against a number of natural hazards. Towards that goal, the resilience of engineered infrastructure is paramount and engineers must be critically engaged. From a structural engineering perspective, this gives rise to a number of dilemmas that are exposed here. This is because, as emphasized here, the concept of resilience is intricately tied to the expression and quantification in time and space of the functionality of communities and its components. Thus, to achieve resilient communities, one needs a resilience framework, methods to quantify resilience, strategies to enhance resilience, and multidisciplinary collaborations. Most specifically, it requires the ability to track how the functionality of all systems and buildings within a specific geographical space evolves over time after a specific event of interest. It is argued here that, in light of the exposed dilemmas, all stakeholders must share common resilience values for a community to become resilient; as such, a “Resilient EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)” concept is proposed as an integrated solution to achieve some resilient communities.
