Multi-hazard Resilient Building Retrofit Strategies Addressing Multiple Bottom-Up and Top-Down Urban Challenges: Fid-Bau Portal

Multi-hazard Resilient Building Retrofit Strategies Addressing Multiple Bottom-Up and Top-Down Urban Challenges

Shamout, Sameh / Boarin, Paola

The built environment, including all the structures and systems that make up our cities, towns, and communities, is facing an increasing range of ongoing stressors and unexpected shocks that threaten its ability to withstand and adapt to change. These challenges include everything from natural disasters and climate change to infrastructure failures and social resilience issues. In order to ensure that our built environment is resilient and able to withstand today’s as well as future challenges, it is essential to have a comprehensive list of strategies that enhance resilience to multiple hazards. While efforts have been made to address building resilience, most of the focus has been at the urban scale. Much work is needed to address multi-hazard resilience at the building scale, and most importantly existing building retrofits as the majority of buildings already exist, and retrofitting them to incorporate a multi-hazard resilience approach presents a significant challenge. This book chapter presents an overview of several retrofit strategies that address a number of bottom-up and top-down urban challenges and promote multi-hazard resilience in buildings. Bottom-up challenges include issues such as high energy costs, water scarcity, natural disasters, and infrastructure failures, whereas top-down challenges include hazards related to climate change, human-made hazards, and social resilience issues. The retrofit strategies outlined in the chapter have been derived from a range of sources, including academic articles, reports, and international sustainable and resilient building guidelines and rating systems. The findings highlight a range of retrofit strategies that can effectively enhance the multi-hazard resilience of buildings. These strategies have been summarised in two tables, which can serve as a foundation for the development of comprehensive guidelines and frameworks aimed at promoting multi-hazard resilience in building retrofits.