ABSTRACT
The resilience of communities depends on the performance of the built environment and on supporting social, economic and public institutions on which the welfare of the community depends. The built environment is susceptible to damage due to a spectrum of environmental, geophysical, and anthropogenic hazards, which are characterized by large uncertainties in spatial and temporal domains. The performance of the built environment within a community depends on the integrated collective performance of its civil infrastructure, which is largely designed by codes, standards, and regulations. Advances in community resilience modeling and assessment will require a fundamental change in the way that code and standard-writing groups approach their tasks to ensure that performance and functionality of the built environment is consistent with desired community-wide resilience goals. The design paradigm of performance-based engineering (or PBE) offers a framework for engineers and planners to achieve these desired levels of performance and functionality. However, PBE has been historically applied to individual buildings and has not yet been used to support community resilience assessments. Herein, we introduce, from a structural engineering perspective, some issues in developing and implementing PBE guidelines and practices aimed at achieving community resilience goals, including the process of de-aggregating those goals to yield design criteria for individual buildings and other structures.
