Opportunity
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Earthquake resilience requires a built environment that not only protects citizens from death and injury, but also enables communities to return to the norms of everyday life soon after a major earthquake. In contrast, for example, current NZ and international building codes focus only on achieving “life safety” performance when a building is subjected to a major earthquake, and do not provide any assurance infrastructure will be repairable afterwards. After the Canterbury Earthquakes with approximately 70% of buildings in the CBD have been demolished, it is time for a new design paradigm whereby reparability or damage-control is explicitly considered in the design process. This requires both the development of new low damage systems and quantification of the reparability (cost and time) of conventional systems.
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